RED Drive and Gyros

[Michael Tsimperopoulos SOC]

We were working today on the top deck of a 90-foot yacht. RED camera, on-board battery and RED Drive (RAID). The only challenging aspect was the very strong and swirling wind, but nothing out of the ordinary or even remotely dangerous. I attached two KS-6s gyros (powered from a dedicated battery) at the bottom of my sled and off we went. First take resulted to a whopping ?292 dropped frames? and the camera turned completely unresponsive. We rebooted and tried again, but it was obvious that the Drive did not like the resonance of the gyros, despite the three-foot distance between them (you could argue of course that distance is completely irrelevant).

 

We continued on CF cards. Everything was fine, except from the fact that we had gone RED on this shoot precisely so we wouldn?t have to reload every four and a half minutes, which now we had to do. We had five CF cards with us. Constant reloading and downloading (an all-steadicam shoot) on the boat was not fun, but there was no way I was going to compromise the shots by not using gyros. (I contemplated switching to the AR, but I would be at least 20 minutes away from being ready, and it wouldn?t be much help against the left-right play from the wind anyway. I needed added inertia and rigidity on the pan axis, not level correction.)

 

I was wondering if anyone of you guys did run into a similar issue with gyros and the RED Drive, or if there is someone who had no problems at all and there is something on my part I should be looking into. I was reading in reduser that there were a few hiccups here and there (to put it mildly) with gyro-assisted aerial systems. Element Technica is coming out soon with a ?shock-isolated? mount for the Drive, so perhaps there is an imminent solution in the horizon, apart from higher capacity CF cards and the Flash Drive getting cheaper.

 

Incidentally, my hard-disc on-board recorder (an FFV NDT-200) never misses a beat (or bit), despite sitting almost on top of the gyros, but of course the demands from the two drives are a world apart.

 

Michael.

[Mike McGowan SOC]

I can't answer your question but I can ask one of my own........... What size card were you using and what?s the size of the one they are coming out with? It seems like if there could be a decent sized card, say 64g than you could just happily use the card. I've had the Red on my PRO with and without the Red Drive and I like the super stream line card option (regardless of gyros). Thoughts?

 

mm.

[Benjamin Treplin]

I have a feature coming up with the RED. Next Friday and Monday are prep. I will test the set up with my two KS6.

I let you know what happened.

 

Cheers

[Lawrence Karman]

What build (software version) was the Red running? 15 or 16? 16 is still Beta but some folks are already using it commercially and there are problems shooting 16x9 4k.

[Lawrence Karman]

Saw this on the Red user net:

 

"At Pictorvision we have RED #970 as one of our in-house camera payloads for our Wescam gimbals and our new Eclipse stabilized aerial gimbal. The Wescam is a mass gyro system (inertia from three 2.5 lb 25,000 RPM brass weights stabilize the camera) and the Eclipse is actively stabilized by a high bandwidth servo loop. While both systems create visually stable images their camera payloads are subjected to considerable high frequency vibrations.

 

We have tried using the RED RAID to get longer runtimes so the helicopter doesn?t have to land every 4½ minutes but even during bench testing, consistently suffer dropped frames on both types of gimbals. We recently tested Element Technica's isolated drive mount on both the Eclipse and the Wescam and were unable to make either configurations drop a single frame. Regardless of what we subjected either gimbal to, the ET drive mount kept the RED RAID humming along. We even de-tuned the Eclipse to the point that it was resonating violently and still no dropped frames."

 

 

http://www.steadicamforum.com/forums/style...e_types/gif.gif

[Alec Jarnagin SOC]

Great. Element Technica is really becoming the "Jerry Hill" of RED land.

[Afton Grant]

I'm curious to know what effect the mount might have in a Steadicam application. It would depend on the properties of the rubber in the mount that is used to absorb the shock. We're always trying to do what we can to make everything on our sleds and cameras as stiff as possible. Could a rubber mount create some high frequency bounce or wiggle?

[Lawrence Karman]

I'm curious to know what effect the mount might have in a Steadicam application. It would depend on the properties of the rubber in the mount that is used to absorb the shock. We're always trying to do what we can to make everything on our sleds and cameras as stiff as possible. Could a rubber mount create some high frequency bounce or wiggle?

 

 

I've seen that mount and the rubber is fairly stiff. Don't think it would effect the rig at all.

[Jon Beattie]

http://actionproducts.ch/actioncam/raidrack.html

 

I wonder if Brian's mount will work with the ET unit?