Archive for March, 2007

Red’s impact: starting small

March 27th, 2007 by Chris Kenny

Where does Red fit into the market? Practically everywhere. This is the first in a series of posts which will examine the implications of a 4K camera for $17.5K is likely to have in various market segments.

Reading forums, one gets the impression that there are many users interested in Red who typically wouldn’t be in the market for a camera in that price range — people and organizations which presently do their shooting on 1/3″ cameras. Quite a few low-end video production shops fall into this category. Why are these shops looking at Red? Presumably because they want to take a shot at moving up-market.

In a recent forum discussion about Red, I was asked why, if these shops are ready to move up-market, they haven’t already done so with, for instance, a VariCam package. Most Red fans — most of the audience of this blog, I’d assume — will find the answer obvious, but I think it’s worth spelling out, because there are some twists that maybe aren’t so obvious.

For some users, it’s simply a matter of timing. They just happen to be looking to move up-market or to start a new venture in a timeframe that lets them do it with Red. This is essentially the situation that the three man operation I’m involved with is in. This isn’t really the interesting answer, though.

In general, the answer is simply that you get a lot more for your money. Not just better tech specs, but — and this is the interesting part — a lot more flexibility. I think what a lot of these small shops want to do, is turn themselves into, to use a phrase from a recent blog comment, “boutique” production companies, which might be doing a large range of things for a large range of clients, as well as developing their own in-house projects, up to and including indie features.

In the next post in this series, I’ll look a bit more at what that means and how it differs from the owner/operator model often seen at the low-end today, as well as the freelancer model often used for high-budget shoots.

Posted in Industry, Red | 4 Comments »

What’s ahead

March 23rd, 2007 by Chris Kenny

Posting might slow down a bit for the next few weeks. Most of the data storage stuff I can talk about, I’ve already talked about, and there probably won’t be much Red news, as Red is saving up announcements for NAB (about a month from now).

I’ll probably do one more post in the storage series, on the benefits of online backups, and I’ll do a couple of posts about where I see Red fitting into the industry. The first of the latter should be up this weekend. If I manage to put my thoughts into some coherent order, I might write something about the potential impact of digital distribution as well.

Red plans to lay out the entire workflow at NAB, and will probably have some other surprises. Plus, Apple seems to have something big in the works. So, once NAB hits, there should be lots to talk about. And, of course, this site will really kick into high gear when we take delivery of Red #404 and the infrastructure we’ll be buying to support it. That’ll probably be a while… but apparently Red plans to let reservation holders in on when they can expect their cameras at NAB as well.

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The future is solid

March 15th, 2007 by Chris Kenny

Perhaps the most interesting thing about Red’s recent price list is the range of solid state recording options — CF, ExpressCard, 1.8″ SATA flash, and Red RAM. The Red RAM is basically a Red Drive, but with two of the new 32 GB flash-based drives, instead of two 160 GB mechanical drives. It’s the three other options that are really interesting, though, because they’ll allow people to use generic commodity flash memory, in their choice of formats, for recording. Care will be required — many CF cards, at least, don’t really have enough performance — but this is an amazingly forward-looking move, and further reenforces my earlier point that Red appears to be taking its cues — both in terms of pricing and the openness of the system — from the computer industry rather than traditional camera vendors.

Solid state memory isn’t quite at the prices we’d like to see for our own use, but prices are dropping very fast. We’ll be passing on these options initially, to see how things settle out with the various formats, but if I had to guess to guess I’d say we’ll probably pick up the 1.8″ SATA flash interface (it’s a user-installable part) within 6-8 months of buying the camera. Probably sometime next year we’ll be able to pick up a 64 GB version of this sort of thing at a reasonable price. Recording ~40 minutes of 4K on something smaller than a credit card is pretty amazing. It’s the sort of thing that reminds you that, despite the lack of flying cars, you really are living in the futuristic year of 2007.

It’ll be interesting to see how Panasonic, which currently sells its P2 solid state memory at 5x the price of commodity flash memory, responds to a camera which can actually use commodity flash memory.

Posted in Hardware, Red, Storage | 1 Comment »

Our package: Red accessories

March 15th, 2007 by Chris Kenny

Red has posted a full price list for their accessories. Reservation holders get a $2500 credit toward accessories.

Here’s what we’ll probably be buying to use with Red #404:

  • Electronic viewfinder
  • Power Pack
  • Premium Production Pack
  • Red Drive (x2)

Might also have to add more batteries, depending on what the expected runtime turns out to be. As for lenses and other non-Red accessories… more on that soon.

Posted in Red | No Comments »

How to store data #3: eSATA RAID continued

March 6th, 2007 by Chris Kenny

This post is a continuation of the previous post on cheap, reliable, manageable storage.

How do you create a volume across multiple drives that makes use of distributed parity (see previous post) without shelling out big money for an enterprise storage system? Windows XP Pro have built-in software RAID 5 support, which which will do nicely. Mac OS X Leopard will have ZFS, which will to really nicely, creating a RAID Z storage pool.

As noted previously, the sweet spot for drives right now is 500 GB drives, and we’ll need five of them for our array, to get 2 TB of storage. The first step is an eSATA enclosure to stick them in. The Sonnet Fusion 500P is exactly the sort of thing we’re looking for. You can pick one of these up for around $440 (here’s one place). That, plus the $700 for drives we’ve figured, brings us to $1140. Add an eSATA card that’s compatible with your system for under $100, for a total of $1240. That’s about the entire outlay required for this system. That, plus the built-in operating features mentioned above, will get you high-performance, fault tolerant RAID for a little less money than buying a bunch of FW 800 drives.

What do you get with a real enterprise storage system (say, an Xserve RAID) that you don’t get with this? Well, you do get a few things. You get remote management tools, redundant power supplies, and battery backup for your RAID controller. Remote management you don’t really need for something that’s going to be attached to your workstation. Redundant power supplies are primarily useful if you need something close to perfect uptime, which is more relevant to server applications (if you’re editing a low-budget feature, you can probably afford to lose a day if the power supply in your enclosure dies and you have to get another one), and for battery backup… buy a UPS; you should have one anyway.

Real enterprise RAID would also get you hardware RAID support, which lowers CPU overhead. This used to be a big deal, when processor power was a scarce resource. But on today’s four (and soon eight) core systems, this is not the issue it once was. And in the case of ZFS in Leopard, you’ll be getting far more flexibility and far more data integrity features from the software-based solution than you could get from any hardware RAID 5 controller.

Anyone can put together a system like this, incidentally. Even if you’ve never installed something in a computer in your life. SATA drives are self-configuring. Unlike their predecessors, they don’t have dip switches, master/slave modes, etc., so it’s really just a matter of plugging and going. I’ll be posting a full walkthrough (with photos and screencasts) of how to set up the hardware and get everything working with OS X around the time our RED #404 arrives.

Of course, you still have to back all of this up. See my previous post on that subject.

Posted in Software, Storage | 1 Comment »