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3rd Party CF Cards Compatibility with the RED ONE


Joe Taylor

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***Posted this same Topic at Reduser.net and have already received some outright nasty PM's. I have a RED ONE reserved and am only looking options. How can these legitimate questions be construed as "trolling" is sort of troublesome. RED actually endorses that forum***

 

Can/Will 3rd Party CF Cards work as well as RED's brand of CF Card with the RED ONE? I have done a search and do understand that some will work, but since RED's cards are significantly more expensive I am wondering if RED's CF Cards are somehow different from say, Sandisk.

 

How are RED's 8 GB CF Cards different from a 8 GB Kingston or Sandisk?

 

As newer and higher capacity off-brand disks are released in the future, can we be assured that RED will update their cameras to be compatible? And ill the RED FLASH (CF) MODULE work with off brand CF Cards>

 

With the newer 32GB CF Cards coming out, it seems like a so much more attractive filming solution to purchase these cards over the very expensive and heavier RED Raid and Flash drives.

Edited by Joe Taylor
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Hi Joe,

 

Welcome to the safe haven for Red Users.

 

Speed is the big issue here, the 8GB Lexar 300x will work as it is the same as the Red card. RED cards have to be FAST that's why they are expensive.

 

Red had to develop their own 16GB card as nobody made a fast enough one, so no cheap alternatives at this time.

 

Stephen

 

***Posted this same Topic at Reduser.net and have already received some outright nasty PM's. I have a RED ONE reserved and am only looking options. How can these legitimate questions be construed as "trolling" is sort of troublesome. RED actually endorses that forum***

 

Can/Will 3rd Party CF Cards work as well as RED's brand of CF Card with the RED ONE? I have done a search and do understand that some will work, but since RED's cards are significantly more expensive I am wondering if RED's CF Cards are somehow different from say, Sandisk.

 

How are RED's 8 GB CF Cards different from a 8 GB Kingston or Sandisk?

 

As newer and higher capacity off-brand disks are released in the future, can we be assured that RED will update their cameras to be compatible? And ill the RED FLASH (CF) MODULE work with off brand CF Cards>

 

With the newer 32GB CF Cards coming out, it seems like a so much more attractive filming solution to purchase these cards over the very expensive and heavier RED Raid and Flash drives.

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Thanks Stephan. I truly could not find that info. at RedUser. I knew if I asked that question that the responses I would get would, no matter what, be far from helpful. They never are. But those extremely hard-pressed go-getters-- too damned busy to be bothered with such nonsense, still had to go way out their ways to respond, not with friendly answers or advice, but insults. I would love to post the PM's that I got from two jerks who knew lashing out at me in public would be unacceptable-- not even at RedUser. That's why they instead insulted me with private messages. One prominant member actually accused me "trolling." So depressing and pathetic.

 

If I wasn't spending $25,000 of my hard earned money with them I would probably laugh. I can assure you I will not be laughing later. If only there was another company out there who I knew would soon be offering a comparable camera, I'd drop RED like a bad habit.

 

Again, thank you for being helpful.

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Thanks Stephan. I truly could not find that info. at RedUser. I knew if I asked that question that the responses I would get would, no matter what, be far from helpful. They never are. But those extremely hard-pressed go-getters-- too damned busy to be bothered with such nonsense, still had to go way out their ways to respond, not with friendly answers or advice, but insults. I would love to post the PM's that I got from two jerks who knew lashing out at me in public would be unacceptable-- not even at RedUser. That's why they instead insulted me with private messages. One prominant member actually accused me "trolling." So depressing and pathetic.

 

If I wasn't spending $25,000 of my hard earned money with them I would probably laugh. I can assure you I will not be laughing later. If only there was another company out there who I knew would soon be offering a comparable camera, I'd drop RED like a bad habit.

 

Sorry that you were treated that way by a FEW people at Reduser. I believe the issue the people had was that this info IS there at Reduser, but you have to search for it. I actually already answered a similar question this week on another post there. It just gets tiring answering the same old questions when people are not reading the FAQ's on the forum. Always try using google to search sites by search like this "search term site:reduser.net"

 

And Stephen was partly wrong about the 32 GB CF cards. The actual cards RED had developed are 16 GB cards and not 32 GB cards. Since they had to have them specially made, I am guessing that 32 GB CF cards are a long time coming:( Of course, flash technology is changing every month.

 

Matthew

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Joe... don't forget to put you hand to your forehead. I answered your question 1 hour and 20 minutes after you posted (on a Saturday). As for the info that Stephen has offered, we do not have a 32GB RED CF card option. Our 16GB card will be released in a couple of weeks.

 

This may be a safe haven for a RED user? :-)

 

Jim

Edited by Jim Jannard
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Joe... don't forget to put you hand to your forehead. I answered your question 1 hour and 20 minutes after you posted (on a Saturday). As for the info that Stephen has offered, we do not have a 32GB RED CF card option. Our 16GB card will be released in a couple of weeks.

 

This may be a safe haven for a RED user? :-)

 

Jim

 

Hi Jim,

 

So no 32 GB RED CF card option planned then?

 

Stephen

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***Posted this same Topic at Reduser.net and have already received some outright nasty PM's. I have a RED ONE reserved and am only looking options. How can these legitimate questions be construed as "trolling" is sort of troublesome. RED actually endorses that forum***

 

Can/Will 3rd Party CF Cards work as well as RED's brand of CF Card with the RED ONE? I have done a search and do understand that some will work, but since RED's cards are significantly more expensive I am wondering if RED's CF Cards are somehow different from say, Sandisk.

 

How are RED's 8 GB CF Cards different from a 8 GB Kingston or Sandisk?

 

As newer and higher capacity off-brand disks are released in the future, can we be assured that RED will update their cameras to be compatible? And ill the RED FLASH (CF) MODULE work with off brand CF Cards>

 

With the newer 32GB CF Cards coming out, it seems like a so much more attractive filming solution to purchase these cards over the very expensive and heavier RED Raid and Flash drives.

 

 

" How can these legitimate questions be construed as "trolling" is sort of troublesome. RED actually endorses that forum"

 

Well that's what they get when they allow Fanboys to think they're spokesmen for the company. Or that they are in line for some special reward for the arduous task of harrassing people on an Internet Forum on the company's behalf. :rolleyes:

 

As RED get closer to becoming a mainstream electronics manufacturer, I think they're beginning to realize why all their competitors are so inflexible about customers using non-approved accessories.

 

In reality, if you allow your staff to make the merest suggestion that could be interpreted as approval of some third-party accessory, technique, or whatever, that they are not in a position to test, and something goes wrong, you are liable to wind up with your help line clogged up by Bush Lawyers, telling you how at YOU'RE going to pay for another trip to Borneo because it's YOUR fault that they lost all their footage of some bloody jungle festival that only happens once every lunar eclipse or something.

 

If you think I'm exaggerating, a couple of weeks back I was trying to help out a local supplier of USB mini hard disks who had EXACTLY that problem, with the (Stills camera) customer making exactly that demand! I actually managed to extract the microscopic hard drive and run it on my desk PC. Our relief was short-lived when we found there was no sign anything had ever been written on it, but I could read and write files to it with no trouble. So he comes in making these demands, with no proof, only a couple of SD cards, both conveniently re-formatted. (I think everyone here needs to spend some time on a Manufacturer's phone help line, to get some appreciation of the things people will try on. All of which takes away from the time available to handle legitimate complaints...)

 

With CF cards, the big problem is not just whether they work when you test them, but how well you can trust them to work under all conditions. Personally I suspect that the explanation for the shortfall in the speed performance of most brands is simply that as CMOS chips get hotter their maximum operating speed tends to fall, and if they are run continuously recording video, they are going to get considerably hotter than they would when occasionally transferring stills from an ordinary digital camera.

 

RED do not say whether the recording is at a constant data rate or not, but if it's some sort of Variable Bit Rate system, you could imagine that if you were shooting a long burst of complex images the chip might tend to overheat. In a lot of cases, a glitch in the middle of a take is just as bad as no take. For example, you might shoot the same test card 100 times without a glitch, but when you use the same card to shoot an expensive sequence from a helicopter, it might not be so happy!

 

The RED cards are not particularly expensive for what they are. If you are finding cheaper ones, there is probably a good reason for it. You don't really want to find out what that is when all the dynamite goes off :P

 

I can remember when it was $500 for a 512M SD card that was as slow as a wet weekend....

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It's usually quite difficult to put VBR encoders into ASIC and I would assume it hasn't been done here.

 

What gets me about this discussion is the idea that Red are somehow capable of stamping their feet until someone makes them a 16GB compactflash card that's faster than what's already on the market. Apple take fully 13% of world NAND flash production and I doubt even they could achieve such a thing - OEMs like Samsung, who make most of the flash that exists in the world, are pushing the envelope on flash production to an enormous degree and are not in a position to release faster or larger chips simply because Jannard asked them to. Believe me, they'd love to release 64GB 300-speed flash cards. They can't because humanity does not yet have technology to do it. It's science fiction.

 

People assume far too much of these people.

 

P

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What gets me about this discussion is the idea that Red are somehow capable of stamping their feet until someone makes them a 16GB compactflash card that's faster than what's already on the market. Apple take fully 13% of world NAND flash production and I doubt even they could achieve such a thing - OEMs like Samsung, who make most of the flash that exists in the world, are pushing the envelope on flash production to an enormous degree and are not in a position to release faster or larger chips simply because Jannard asked them to. Believe me, they'd love to release 64GB 300-speed flash cards. They can't because humanity does not yet have technology to do it. It's science fiction.

 

People assume far too much of these people.

 

Well, considering that Jim said RED went out and had their 16 GB cards specially made... The RED 16GB cards are also many times more expensive then other somewhat fast 16 GB cards.

 

Matthew

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Well, considering that Jim said RED went out and had their 16 GB cards specially made... The RED 16GB cards are also many times more expensive then other somewhat fast 16 GB cards.

 

Matthew

I would say they are either specially selected from standard high-end 16GB by some proprietary test process, or at the most, the components that go into them are specially selected for adequate speed under R3D recording conditions.

It's like a lot of the other RED Sci Fi that Fanboys passionately believe; if they could really fab chips like that, they would make far more money from those than selling video cameras.

As it is, if the RED was half as good as most of them say it is, you would think the military and security industries would be far better customers, with much deeper pockets.

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> Well, considering that Jim said RED went out and had their 16 GB cards specially made...

 

Of course he bloody didn't.

 

Good grief these people are stupid.

 

Phil... another time you are calling us liars. Of course we did. You won't find this card with these specs from another supplier. If we could have bought them from Lexar, SanDisk or some other easy supplier, we would have. The RED 8GB cards now say "Powered by Lexar" on them. It is no secret. The 16GB cards do not.

 

I do believe your second comment... just not sure who the stupid one is.

 

You are pretty brave behind your little mouse.

 

Jim

Edited by Jim Jannard
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As it is, if the RED was half as good as most of them say it is, you would think the military and security industries would be far better customers, with much deeper pockets.

Keith, security, military, science, astronomy etc use only digital cameras for their high end - since a long time. These industries have somewhat higher requirements for image resolution & quality as the movie industry.

In that market 100MP sensors are pretty usual since many years - as are better optics than anything angenieux/zeiss deliver for the cinema market. Just google "Hubble" for receiving and "ABL" for emitting lenses.

film is passe in these markets.

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Arguing with Jannard is clearly pointless.

 

The thing everyone's overlooking here is that given the large amount of compression they're applying, the cards don't particularly need to have a spec that's in any way out of the ordinary - unless they just want to stop people using third party equipment.

 

P

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Arguing with Jannard is clearly pointless.

 

The thing everyone's overlooking here is that given the large amount of compression they're applying, the cards don't particularly need to have a spec that's in any way out of the ordinary - unless they just want to stop people using third party equipment.

 

P

 

Since you have no reply to my response to your 1st allegation, you cleverly change the topic. But again, wrong. We have been adding options to the camera that reduce the compression. If you want to take advantage of the increased data rate, you need faster media... with me so far? If you want to shoot the lowest data rate and the smallest format, no problem. Buy yours at K Mart. I now assume that you will slide over to some other topic?

 

Your comments here remind me of your 1st posts... RED can't make their own sensor. We go way back...

 

Jim

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Arguing with Jannard is clearly pointless.

 

The thing everyone's overlooking here is that given the large amount of compression they're applying, the cards don't particularly need to have a spec that's in any way out of the ordinary - unless they just want to stop people using third party equipment.

 

Back in the real world, here are some actual CF card benchmarks, using a high-performance FW800 card reader. You see anything there you'd trust to record a variable bit rate data stream that might goe as high as 36 MB/s? I see one card that might be able to do it. It's -- surprise -- the 8 GB Lexar card that Red is rebranding. And even that card doesn't support 4K 16:9 REDCODE 36 recording -- it's not quite fast enough. Neither Lexar nor Sandisk (the #2 performer on that list) have released 16 GB cards with similar performance yet -- the higher density chips are, at the moment, still slower than the fastest lower-density chips they can make.

 

Now, it's true that Red almost certainly isn't having custom chips made. But via packaging (maybe arranging chips into tiny little RAID 0 arrays) or by simply selecting unusually high-performance chips, it seems entirely possible that Red could make custom cards faster than the ones currently on the market.

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There are several statements here I would like to respond to.

Unfortunately as a result of having laughed my arse off, I am finding it difficult to type standing up.

Normal programming will resume as soon as possible.

Edited by Keith Walters
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Your comments here remind me of your 1st posts... RED can't make their own sensor. We go way back...

 

Jim

 

Hi Jim,

 

Are you saying Red designed & manufactured the sensor entirely with employees of RED Digital Cinema Camera Company without any help from third parties or taking over an existing project?

 

Stephen

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Hi Jim,

 

Are you saying Red designed & manufactured the sensor entirely with employees of RED Digital Cinema Camera Company without any help from third parties or taking over an existing project?

 

Stephen

 

The Mysterium sensor was/is a fresh sheet of paper design owned and fabbed exclusively for RED. We did NOT buy an existing product or sensor design from any of the companies known for sensor sales and productions... IBM, Canon, Sony, Dalsa, Micron, Fill Factory... whatever. If we had, you would have seen the same sensor in some other camera! We have full-time sensor development staff at RED working on Mysterium X and the next generation sensor after that.

 

The fact that you guys continue to push this button is scary. It sounds like you are saying "you can't do this". My response would be, "what I am hearing you say is that YOU can do it or don't know anyone that can. That doesn't mean we can't do it".

 

Of course we need help from 3rd parties on almost everything we make... as does every camera company. Do you really think that Canon makes every single component of their lenses, including the glass? Do you think Sony makes their own capacitors?

 

Jim

Edited by Jim Jannard
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It is pretty funny that there is so much disbelief about what we do at RED... but only by the people that have never visited the operation. Why not stop speculating and come by...? I think the picture you have now would change dramatically.

 

Jim

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The Mysterium sensor was/is a fresh sheet of paper design owned and fabbed exclusively for RED.

 

Of course we need help from 3rd parties on almost everything we make... Jim

 

Hi Jim,

 

IIRC Phil said you could not fabricate the chip in house.

 

My best

 

Stephen

 

Edit I have been loking through the archives:-

also

 

Hi,

 

Actually at NAB I did say "It's not that we don't think you can do it, we just don't think you can do it in the advertised timescale and budget."

 

Phil

 

There was an engineering delay. Phil also has given some serious input

 

Hi,

 

All I'd say is try and be standardised.

 

If there's a standard way of doing something (SMPTE audio-modulated timecode on BNCs, 3/8" Whitworth threads on tripod mounts, 4-pin XLR power connectors are trivial examples) please do it that way; don't cook up some odd way of doing it yourselves to save $5. What I'm trying to avoid by this request is the situation you get with small handycams covered from top to bottom in adapters and cables trying to turn it into a real camera.

 

And sturdy connectors, please. I appreciate this is difficult with standards like USB and firewire (when is someone going to define a standard for doing those on more robust connectors?) but audio comes on XLRs not RCAs and other things come on Lemos not DINs.

 

Probably all the previous goes without saying, but it's worth repeating.

 

Also, straightforward control interfaces for straightforward items. Close to activate contacts for start and stop and single-frame shooting on a readily available connector. Not XYZ complicated data bus. And, if like many cameras you're going to run a software operating system on the thing, at least provide an API for common functions - this will allow the opensource community to script applications for it to allow amusing things like wifi links to the script supervisor's laptop, and intelligent metadata processing. I'm not saying do it, I'm saying make it possible to do.

 

Phil

 

Hi,

 

I like the rods/cage idea; people constantly gripe that there's no flat surfaces to fix things onto (particularly using velcro, and particularly in a Steadicam sort of mode) on many contemporary cameras.

 

 

Phil

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Would it be possible to take a step back from the bleeding edge and double your recording time by putting two slots in the body and striping across pairs of CF cards?

 

Given that eights are the only single cards fast enough, could it be that a pair of 16's would work like that and give you 32? That would give you 16+ minutes between changes. For our shows, that's about as many eggs as we'd be comfortable having in one basket. The only slight downside I can see is that we'd have to take care to keep the pairs together. (Oh, and of course, it's a hardware change, which ain't cheap or easy....)

 

 

 

-- J.S.

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Would it be possible to take a step back from the bleeding edge and double your recording time by putting two slots in the body and striping across pairs of CF cards?

 

Given that eights are the only single cards fast enough, could it be that a pair of 16's would work like that and give you 32? That would give you 16+ minutes between changes. For our shows, that's about as many eggs as we'd be comfortable having in one basket. The only slight downside I can see is that we'd have to take care to keep the pairs together. (Oh, and of course, it's a hardware change, which ain't cheap or easy....)

 

-- J.S.

Actually I am beginning to suspect that that is what they have already done, to make their 16GB cards. There are not many applications that require that much memory to be accessed all in one hit, and even less that need to do it in ten minutes so. You will probably find that at the moment manufacturing yields for high speed 16GB chips are so low that making up a special card incorporating two 8GB chips might be the cheaper option.

 

I have serious doubts about the reliability of those tiny 50-pin connectors. Although they are designed to stand up to a reasonable amount of abuse, they were never really intended for all that much plugging and unplugging, since most digital cameras allow you to downlaod images without removing the card. If one of those tiny pins breaks off, the camera could be out of action.

 

The ironic thing about CF is that it was originally designed as a direct replacement for an IDE type hard disk, in fact the 50 pin connector has exactly the same layout as a standard Hard Disk connector. When they were first developed about 12 years ago, it was thought that a parallel interface was going to be the only way they were ever going to get any speed out of the things. However modern serial access formats such as SD and USB seem to be able keep up quite well, using only two pins (plus ground) for data transfer. SD cards use a rugged wiping contact system with much larger contact area. I still believe some sort of module based on parallel CF cards would be more reliable in the long run.

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