Transcodes-to-go

Transcodes-to-go

I'm really interested in these enclosures for the RED Rocket Card.

Mobile Rocket from Maxx Digital 

Offhollywood >>>

LaunchPAD by Peter Matajan

Both of these products while announced a year ago seem to be of somewhat limited availability and there aren't a whole lot of in-depth user reviews online. I'd love to chat with someone who has one and demo it if possible.

The technology behind these provides an external bus to attach a double wide PCIe card such as the Red Rocket, so it can be interfaced with via the ExpressCard slot on your laptop. I've never tested this. Never even seen it but I do know how buggy and crashy ExpressCard is on MacBook Pro. I also can speculate that when you take a device that's optimized to work on 8 Lanes and slow it down to 1 despite the accelerating hardware in the box, there's no way it can achieve top performance. According to the Maxx site -

"Speed of transcoding to QT/MXF is dependent on the laptop processor speed. (ProRes runs at about 14fps from 4k)"

Even 14fps to ProRes along with realtime playback of R3D's over SDI is enough to warrant having one of these. My current laptop is a 15" MacBook Pro with a 2.4 GHz chip and 4 GB RAM (yes I know I need a new computer) and to render a full debayer from 4k to 1080p ProRes 422 takes about 45 minutes per 1 minute of RED footage. It's simply impractical do transcodes on a laptop, even a maxed out 17" MBP, without dedicated hardware like the Rocket. Time like that can be incredibly costly and can grind things to a halt. Post and Transfer houses LOVE getting drives full of R3D's because all that transcode time costs a fortune. A production I was working with recently had a month long RED shoot and didn't do anything with the files until photography wrapped. They handed a sizable stack of G-Raid drives to a well known post production facility and got a bill a few weeks later for $160,000. It's clearly advantageous for a production to do this on-set or to do it a facility that is equipped to transcode in real time. Namely with the Red Rocket, which zips on a Mac Pro Tower so even if it got to 50% of its potential on a laptop, that would be a massive improvement and in my mind, totally worth it. 

My only concern is crashiness. I'd love to take one for a test spin or I might just take the plunge. A tower would be the smart thing to do but it's just so much stuff to haul around and I don't do enough RED to really warrant the purchase of a 6 Core with 12GB RAM. 

I heard the video tap on the upcoming EPIC camera will be a clean (no overlays) 1080p. If that's the case, then great. Need on-set dailies or high quality offline media? No need to break out the Rocket, just record the video tap to ProRes with the upcoming Ki Pro Mini. Records to cheap Compact Flash cards in every flavor of ProRes and is only $2000. Get 2 and do one ProRes HQ for the editor and one ProRes Proxy for the director and producers. It's also the size of a Dionic battery. I think this little box is going to be everywhere. Why wouldn't you do a redundant recording in a high quality codec if it were so cheap and easy? (disclaimer - I'm also a fan of the NanoFlash which does some things this can't do.)

Ki Pro Mini Site >>>

Glyph Triplicator

Glyph Triplicator

Just got wind of this but haven't had a chance to try it out. 

This device mounts on your desktop as one drive while simultaneously downloading to up to 3 external destinations at the same speed if it were one. Amazing hardware driven technology. As boring as it is, data management is now a big part of the job and a product like this theoretically makes the process a little less painless. We'll see..

400 USD from B&H which is reasonable enough to try it out and if it's a bust - eBay!

http://www.glyphtech.com/products/triplicator/

btw Glyph Technologies is a great company based out of Ithaca, NY who really understands the modern data-centric video workflow. If you're going to buy drives, buy Glyph!

Update

on 2011-02-08 14:53 by Ben Cain

My Triplicator has received the "drive re-mount" firmware upgrade and it now functions as one would want it to - you can easily start a triplicator set, put it away, and then use it again without losing any data. It's fantastic. The time savings are enormous. I'll be doing a separate post later this week.

Update

on 2010-11-02 02:42 by Ben Cain

Just picked up my pre-production Triplicator. It even has some cautionary text on the box - "Confidential: To be opened by the extremely savvy early adopter only." NERD alert. Will let you know if the thing does what it claims to do. I'm way too excited about this.. it's a sign. 

Update

on 2010-11-02 23:21 by Ben Cain

So the Triplicator that I have is definitely the "early adopter" model. I'm willing to give the product a chance as the vendor I purchased it from assured me that firmware is in development that will address the issues I'm having. The functionality is a bit odd and counter-intuitive to how most people would want to use a product like this. 

I'll reserve judgment until the thing is out of Beta but just so you know - here's the rub - and this isn't something on the Glyph website. If it were, i probably wouldn't have bought it. 

The thing needs to re-intialize whatever drives are attached to it upon power cycling. So if you download some shots in the morning and then you have to power down for whatever reason (company move, etc), in order to download to those drives again via The Triplicator it first has to initialize them, i.e. delete the entire contents. Nice. Scratching my head about this.. when have you ever only done one download per day? Supposedly the ability to re-mount drives without re-formatting them is in the works. I certainly hope so or else this thing has a date with eBay. 

"Shot in 3D" - Drawing the Distinction.

"Shot in 3D" - Drawing the Distinction. 

Here you go. At least one producer is wising up to the fact that audiences are beginning to associate rushed, hack 2D to 3D conversions with a truly awful movie-going experience. I maintain that if anything is going to kill digital 3D it will only be the greed of the studio system looking to cash in on the "gimmick". Either that or lawsuits from permanently crossed eyes. Stop the hack conversions. Stop ruining movies to sell a few more tickets (or in the case of The Last Airbender, adding insult to injury.) Now what I'd really love to see is someone use 3D in an artful, subtle way. Actually use it as a story telling device to draw the viewer in deeper instead of going for 3D low blows like throwing projectiles into the theatre space. They all do it. I think "producer brain" has a check list of obligatory gimmicks to include in every 3D show, like reminding the audience they're at a 3D movie by shooting an arrow at their face.