With each passing day, hard-drive recording systems from S.two and the new portable Flash-based recorder from Thomson are showing up on the sets of a growing list of A-list feature film directors and DPs shooting with digital cameras. Recording this way streamlines the post-production process and sometimes even saves producers money. However, those who shoot HD video exclusively for a living, with smaller production budgets, are much less enthusiastic, based on bad experiences with corrupt RAM drives and power losses that more than once have wiped out a complete day’s work.
Besides offering the benefit of IT technology that is not susceptible to vibration, moisture or extreme temperatures, these disk-drive or solid-state recorders provide a quick way to move footage through the post process. Once you begin recording, RAM drives need uninterrupted power or else the data gets erased. Disk drives, no matter how stable, are a short-term storage technology for getting footage from the set to the post house. However, if you’re using an off-the-shelf recording system made up of some type of ATA disk-drive system, you’re setting yourself up for problems.
S.two’s D.Mag removable magazine system (made up of non-RAID-protected fibre-channel drives) is one way to avoid issues with RAM drives. It records approximately 36 minutes of uncompressed HD RGB data. Compatible with a variety of manufacturers’ cameras, the S.two recorder has been used in helicopters and on sound stages. One will even be brought up in space by NASA in 2006 (with a Grass Valley Viper FilmStream camera from Thomson). Having a removable magazine protects against data loss, as does the system’s docking station and a data tape back-up system that produces clones of the original frames for safe keeping on a portable archival system.
The Grass Valley Venom FlashPak system records to a series of solid-state flash memory cards (100 GB total) housed within a rugged magazine that, when shooting with the Viper in FilmStream mode, holds 10 minutes of footage; 18 minutes can be saved in the camera’s 4:2:2 HD mode. Mark Chiolis, Grass Valley’s senior marketing manager for acquisition products, said the company chose solid-state technology for its well-known stability, even under harsh conditions.
The independent feature Silence Becomes You was shot by DP Arturo Smith with a Viper over 38 days this past winter in the Lithuanian capital city of Vilnius and claims to be the first all-data live-action feature production. Smith used specialized optical filters to reduce the amount of green in the raw FilmStream data, which was saved uncompressed to an S.two system. By all accounts, the crew saved money and time by producing the project without film or videotape.
The cost of the recorders remains a considerable barrier for independent videographers. S.two’s DFR portable recorder costs about $50,000. A spare magazine, which is highly recommended, costs about $10,000. Grass Valley’s Venom FlashPak, an integrated recorder that mounts on top of the Viper camera, starts at about $58,000. On a typical movie shoot, Thomson suggests having two or three Venom FlashPak systems: one in the camera, one ready to replace it, and one writing to the transport medium to be delivered to the post house.
That’s a lot of money for anyone other than an A-list director (like David Fincher and Michael Mann) and DP (Dane Lawing and Dion Beebe) to afford. Of course, there are rental houses, like The Camera House in Hollywood, CA, that offer digital cinematography camera packages that include a Viper camera, an S.two recorder and several video monitors for about $6,000 per day (a typical 35mm film package rents for about $5,000/day), which helps keep costs manageable. The same package with a Venom recorder costs about $600 more per unit (most productions require two).
Representatives of these companies will tell you that it’s cheaper to record to a hard drive than to videotape. During production of Silence Becomes You, the production saved as much as a third of what it would have spent capturing footage on Sony’s HDCAM SR 4:4:4 format, according to Steve Roach, S.two’s VP of marketing & technology. It saved even more when compared to 16 or 35mm film stock and processing costs.
It’s also helpful to have an experienced digital imaging technician (DIT) on set who knows how to handle digital data. But that’s a story for another issue.
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