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Red Scarlet Data Wrangling


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Hello all,

I've been called in last minute for a friends project to do a bit of data wrangling on Saturday, I have done it before but only at a very basic level. They will be shooting on the Red Scarlet in 4K and I've been informed that some care needs to be taken when it comes to handling and organising the footage because of the way the files are structured by the camera. So by the sounds of things, a simple 'copy and paste' into the external hard drive might not cut it. Unfortunately, I can't provide a workflow as the editor recently pulled out of the project and they haven't managed to find a new one yet. So I was just wondering if there is someone who has had experience data wrangling footage from the Red Scarlet who could give me some advice on what would be the best way to tackle this?

Thanks

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Generally I make folder corresponding to the roll, e.g. A001, and from there I just drag and drop the whole red-mag per offload. Then I copy that to a secondary drive before sending the card back to rotation. I haven't ever had a problem personally, but then again I am NOT a DIT/Wrangler myself and this is on smaller projects.

Unless you're being asked to make dailies and sync audio and the like, this should be fine.

 

It's just important to mantain the filestructure of the card within it's own folder on the drive per card, e.g. A001--->whole recard, A002-->card 2, etc etc.

 

Hopefully, too, when they formatted the card in the camera they put the proper roll number on it.

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You can purchase a shotputpro license to the laptop so that you can do checksum verified transfers. The red cameras with fat file system divide the clips to 4gb files which are quite a pain to verify visually. I recommend just using the checksum verification and saving the checksum to a file along with the materials so that you can also, whenever needed, to re check that all the materials match the original files which were on the camera card

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  • 4 weeks later...

Sorry late to the game on this. Being a loader, folder structure is important. And it goes for every camera, not just RED. If you haven't gotten a structure from post, and you have to create it, then try to make it so anyone can figure it out. If the name is too long, use abbreviations and always the date. If you're only using 1 camera then you can just put everything in that folder. If multiple cameras then create an A Cam, B Cam,etc & audio folders.

 

If you don't have Shotput or other checksum and are using a Mac, a simple verification is use Disk Utility and just pick the drive and click verify. If you don't want to do that, just make sure the size of the card matches the folder on all your drives you copy to. And I always scrub thru the footage, I've had bad card readers where the Shotput verified the card yet there was green bands in the footage.

 

When the card is done, with REDs at least, I delete the 2 RED files in the top folder so when they put the card in the camera they have to format.

 

Hope this helps.

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one thing to remember if using multiple cameras or cameras that don't automatically increment the card number by one when formatting:

ALWAYS make sure that the camera letter is right and the card number is correct. it is so much easier to check that everything is ok in all copies and do the editing and online later if you only have one A001 card in the project and you can track down the shooting day and camera etc. quickly just by looking the filename.

The common mistake in smaller projects is to not keep the B and C camera letters and numbers constant so that there may be C camera card2 which is named A004, or every camera named A camera at first, or B camera card numbers starting from 001 again when shooting the next block, and so on.

 

The simplest folder structure would be Shooting day (Day01 etc.) / Camera card (like Card01 if the camera does not create unique card names when formatting) or the real card name like A001R0Z1) /then all the original card contents and the checksum file generated by the transfer software.

 

When everything is copied correctly and all the backups are checked and OK one can delete the card contents as Steve said to make sure that it will be formatted in camera. It is extremely frustrating if the DIT gives back cards which may or may not be copied correctly so the AC always needs to confirm if the card can be formatted or not. "I only have one copy of this but three copies of that but I can't remember which one is which so can you just make sure to call me always before formatting anything so that we won't accidentally lose any material" :D

Same thing with spare hard drives etc. , if the drive is labelled as "empty" or "this can be formatted" but it contains some random material, then one always needs to check first if it really can be formatted or if it is just some material wrongly labeled which will be destroyed if formatting is done :wacko:

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