Transferring RED files

[Ashley Wing]

Hey guys,

 

We've had an opportunity rise to use a RED cam on our next shoot, I'm still skeptical after hearing so many horror stories but it seems to good an opportunity to miss trying for myself. We're not shooting any more than 5 mins of footage and I'm going to hold my hands up and say it our first time using equipment like this. I just wanted to get some idea of the transfer process.

 

I've watched a couple of videos and read through some threads but there's no description of the physical process involved.

 

I am familiar with the Panasonic HVX200 setup and that's as far as my experience goes with file transferring from solid state to a laptop. Is the RED similar to this process or will I need any extra equipment?

 

We are sending the files to a studio to be edited so the only thing I'm worried about is getting the digital negative/files off the camera and stored onto a macbook pro, which we'll then transfer on to an ext drive.

 

My macbook is a 2.4 GHz Intel Core 2 Duo with 4GB of ram, I hope this is okay just for the pure use of putting the files on, it's not going to crash from the data dump?

 

I hear a lot about transferring the footage through a firewire 800 cable and I wasn't sure if this was a direct connection from camera to laptop.

 

If anyone can help - or link me, I'd be very grateful. I have looked and I only seem to find talk about the backup drives and space, not the actual process. I just wanted to make sure we could transfer the files as we won't have a technician.

 

Many Thanks,

Ash.

[Kevin Zanit]

The R3d files are pretty small actually, as long as you have enough hard drive space it should be fine. Its the same as just copying files from a portable hard drive or thumb drive, etc.

 

If you are using the REDDrive, it has firewire 800, 400 and USB. Use whatever connection you want, you won't really see much difference in speed. The REDDrive is only a single drive, so your never going to get much more than 60mb/s (though I would expect more like 40), especially if you are transferring to a single drive as well.

 

If you are using CF cards, you need a CF card reader, which I think mainly come with USB connections.

[John Sprung]

I just wanted to get some idea of the transfer process.

 

That's one of the problems. There isn't a standardized or customary process. We have three shows currently shooting on Red, no two of them use the same kit and procedures. You have to cobble something together on your own.

 

As you only plan to shoot 5 minutes of material, this first job will be quite easy. You'll be able to do it on a single 16 Gig CF card rather than tracking dozens of them. You'll need a CF reader for your computer, and enough hard drive space available. Transfer from the CF to the hard drive, then to be safe, back up onto a couple USB memory sticks. Watch it from the hard drive on the computer to be sure it's OK.

 

For a bigger show, you'd need to attach a Raid array to the computer and transfer from that to portable hard drives. We like the 500 Gig solid state portable drives, sort of memory sticks on steroids. Other things to think about are using MD-5 checksums, or backing up to LTO's. You could do LTO's on location, or at the post facility. Edit: Oh, and one more thing, you'll need a file naming convention.

 

 

 

 

-- J.S.