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Thursday, January 31, 2008

Let’s Play “20 Questions” About Red Drives…

Let’s play “20 Questions” about Red Drives…

Jarred Land announced on Reduser the other week that Red Drives were shipping.

For those not keeping score, the Red Drives is the hard drive recording solution for the Red One camera. Up until Red Drives shipped, your only recording option was the special high speed CF cards (compact flash) recording officially 4 1/2 minutes of 4K at 24p apiece *. Since only one Red CF card can be loaded at a time, this was roughly the equivalent of a 400 foot film load. Survivable for steadicam work, a nonstarter for sitdown interviews.

That changes with the release of the Red Drives - you can record over TWO HOURS of 4K footage to the Red Drives, and many more hours of 2K footage (details below).

The Red Drives are comprised of two 160GB 2.5” mechanism hard drives set up in a RAID 0 (striped) configuration. This doubles the capacity and speed versus a regular drive....and also doubles the chances of failure - if one drive fails, you’d lose ALL the data on the pair due to how information is split between the two.

I emailed Ted Schilowitz, Red’s Leader of the Rebellion, a bunch of questions about the Red Drives, here’s what he had to say:

Question 1.) Red Drives are shipping. Great! What is the capacity, and is that any different from the USABLE capacity (beyond the 320 formats to 296GB stuff) - is there any partitioning going on?

Answer: Useable capacity is just that, slightly under 300 gigs – no paritioning.  Although I would not recommend shooting the full capacity of the drive unless you absolutely have to – just as an insurance policy – shoot less than an hour per drive and then download and back up your footage (remember this is your digital neg.)

Question 2.) Given that, roughly how much 4K@24p will fit on one?

Answer: roughly 2.5 hours of 4k at 24p

Question 3.) 2K@24p?

Answer: roughly 8 hours of 2k at 24p (mikenote: yikes! That’s a lot of stuff to put on one piece of physical media – aka – don’t shoot all day on one of these unless you have no other choice.)

Question 4.) Are there any feature differences between Red Drive and CF card, other than one’s bigger?

Answer: Solid State vs. Spinning media – solid state more reliable, more expensive per Gig (but getting cheaper all the time) Short run times creates it’s own benefit in splitting up the media load as you are shooting

Question 5.) Can you mix and match 2K & 4K footage on the same Red Drive, presuming you’re always at the same frame rate?

Answer: (amended - Ted originally said no, double checked and got confirmation that you CAN shoot 2K & 4K on the same Red Drive, PROVIDED they are both shooting at the same timecode base - as in, it is ALL 23.976, or 25.0, or 29.97, etc.)

Question 6.) Can you mix frame rates on a Red Drive?

Answer: Yes as long as you are in the same project

(mikenote - I’m betting he means you can mix frame RATES, so long as they are at the same time BASE - as in, if they all set to play back at the same frame rate, such as 23.976 fps, you could be shooting Varispeed for 25, 60, 75, whatever frame rate recording, all of which is to play back at 23.976.)

Question 7.) Is there a Red Drive FAQ anywhere?

Answer: Not that I know of, this would be the first version of that unless someone from the community put something up on RedUser already

Question 8.) How long does it take, at maximum FW800 read speeds, to read off a full Red Drive (such as if you were transfering to a non FW800 RAID on studio Mac)?

Answer: Good question - It’s the same FW 800 as on a FW drive you would connect to your Mac – so you can use the same benchmarks as that for data transfer (maybe barefeets has specs on how long it takes to transfer 100 gigs via FW 800 on an intel Mac?

(mikenote - talking to a production I’ve been consulting with, roughly 30GB of data took roughly 7 minutes to copy off to high speed storage. That works out to 70-75 MB/sec. Knowing what I do about drive performance, that transfer rate is likely to drop if you are reading from the last portions of a full Red Drive. So I’d guesstimate that reading a full Red Drive (about 298GB) would take something like an hour and a half at best...if and ONLY if you had high speed storage that was NOT on the same FireWire bus...and in Macs, the built in ports are ALL on the same bus).

Question 9.) How much impact does it have on battery life to use Red Drive as opposed to CF?

Answer: Minimal – we are seeing over 90 minutes of Runtime with a fully charged RED battery, and the RED Drive attached

Question 10.) Is it always spun up, or does it spin down after inactivity?

Answer: Always spun up.

Hardware •

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It does indeed sound scary to have 8 hours of digital negative on a single harddisk.

Now, if there was a RedDrobo, that might be something

Posted by Martin Weiss  on  02/13  at  02:10 AM

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Lets play hard!

Posted by Laptoper  on  05/13  at  07:55 AM

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