C200: Raw file transcoding strategy for long term footage storage

M

mrchirster

Well-known member
Hey guys,

I'm about to buy the C200. I was convinced I want the EVA1 for codec options but really struggled with the viewfinder when I test drove it at the rental house the other day. Really hated the Zacuto Z Finder btw. Way to heavy and can't tilt the screen right at the viewfinder. Loved the version they did for FS7 without diopter.... Anyways enough prelude.

My plan currently is to stay away from 8bit recording as much as I can. I shot a doc on Red before and I'm going on a 10 day shoot where I want to treat the C200 like a mini red. Interviews will probably be shot in 8bit 4:2:0 because there is 25 of them but everything else in raw. I will take around 14x2TB drives with me but I don't think I want to keep the orginal raw light data long term since it's not feasable in our post production workflow.

So I did some transcoding tests yesterday:

My finding were that in Premiere the MXFOp1 is a good intermediate candidate. It offers 10 bit 422 at 300 Mbit/s (QFHD Class 300). I haven't done any extensive tests in terms of how much it degrades the already compressed raw. Transcoding was definitely slow on my Macbook Pro from 2013, 1 minute taking about 24minutes to transcode. Once I return from the shoot we have two powerful workstations to crunch the footage so I'm not too concerned about this aspect.

Has anyone of you experience with a digital intermediate for the raw files?
 
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What is your end output intended for?
Not sure the advantage of transcoding to a sub-par format from the Cinema RAW Light? Why not just shoot CRL and edit with the .MXF proxies, then conform from Cinema RAW Light? Why re-invent the wheel and have to deal with all of the rendering, what are you gaining?
Also, for storage drives, why wouldn't you take four or five 6TB drives instead? Costco has the Seagate 6TB storage drives on special for $109.99 until July 28th. I would vote for fewer, larger drives personally. Unless you have no access to AC, then you need small bus powered drives but once again Costco has the 4TB bus powered versions for $94.00.
 
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What you gain is hard drive space. MXF 422 10 bit 300 Mbit runs at 128Gb for 60 minutes 4K footage. CRL is around 512GB for 60 minutes. So you can store Clog2 footage in 10bit 422 and have 4x more space on your HDDs. Sure, you lose the ability to dial in white balance but I would be ok with this. I just wonder how much footage will degrade in the process. I'm buying the c200 today and will run some tests.
Ps thanks for the HDD tips, just bought the 4tb portables.
 
mrchirster said:
What you gain is hard drive space. MXF 422 10 bit 300 Mbit runs at 128Gb for 60 minutes 4K footage. CRL is around 512GB for 60 minutes. So you can store Clog2 footage in 10bit 422 and have 4x more space on your HDDs. Sure, you lose the ability to dial in white balance but I would be ok with this. I just wonder how much footage will degrade in the process. I'm buying the c200 today and will run some tests.
Ps thanks for the HDD tips, just bought the 4tb portables.
Click to expand...

Of course, YMMV but hard drive space has never been cheaper and CRL looks slightly sharper than the C300 MKIIs footage. For the workflow you are describing, why not just buy a C300 MKII, there are some good deals out there on them. I don't see the purpose of the C200 in this workflow, too much extra work, rendering and down-rezzing, why not just shoot XF-AVC and be done with it? The C200 is a RAW camera, little reason to buy one if you aren't going to use the RAW workflow.
 
Yeah you might be right.. I do miss the broadcast codecs but appreciate the weight of the c200. I might just buy a ton of drives in the future :)
 
mrchirster said:
Yeah you might be right.. I do miss the broadcast codecs but appreciate the weight of the c200. I might just buy a ton of drives in the future :)
Click to expand...

I was in the same spot. I decided to get the C200 specifically to shoot two documentary films. If I had only been interested in client work, I would have bought the C300 MKII instead, much more client friendly camera. The C200 is more for filmmakers IMHO, the C300 MKII is more for client work, not that you can't use it also for making films. I just thought the C200 would give me ultimate flexibility and quality to shoot a good portion of our film in CRL, it would give us the most latitude to do a really nice color correction and grade when the film is edited. I'm using the Seagate drives that Costco has on sale $109.99 for 6 TB for storage drives and of course, editing on a RAID. It's a bit of a nuisance having to buy so many drives but it's becoming affordable to do so at least.
 
How's the workflow with the 5400/7200RPM (?) drives in your RAID? Manageable? Not slow at all?
 
Even with just a two drive RAID 0, it’s not bad. Moving to a four drive raid in Raid 4 or 5 for the final edit.
 
I'm rolling with a single 2TB 6G SSD to edit off of (with smaller 240GB SSDs for cache). I'm able to get real-time in resolve with several nodes (including filmconvert), and ~45fps out when rendering down to 1080. Part of that is due to my just upgrading my GPU to a GTX1080, but the SSD provides an amazing amount of speed.

EDIT: Talking about editing full 4k RAW.
 
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For sure...I do all of my editing (but with FCPX proxies) on a very fast 2TB SSD as well. It's like editing Standard-Definition.

When it's time to master, I'll connect the other drives with all of the footage (if applicable...usually it's just the 2TB that will mostly fit everything for smaller projects and one other 4TB drive).
 
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