Promise Pegasus J4 or GRaid Thunderbolt?

[Kevin Rag]

Wow! 600 write and 550 read?!! That’s super fast for most people. You editing uncompressed by any chance? RAW footage?
There’s something about the Lacie (brand name) that just turns me off. Not many people use the Lacie for editing, I think. I’ll go for the Graid for now. Thanks for your inputs Rome.

Kannan Raghavan
The Big Toad Films Pte. Ltd.

[Eric Hansen]

Rome, what codecs are you editing with that you need 700MB/s? The only time I need speeds that approach that are for 4k DPX. And in those cases it’s for grading, not for editing. And even then, it’s rare that I have a DPX source. Most of the 4k material is compressed such as R3D and XAVC (Sony).

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Eric Hansen
Production Workflow Designer / Consultant / Colorist / DIT
https://www.erichansen.tv

[Rome Will]

Yeah @Kannan, I was thinking of editing footage from the 2.5k on the BMCC…but now I was thinking of getting the new 4K model…still, I don’t really know how to do proxies and from what it looks like, seems a little complicated.

@ Eric, I guess you’re right…if I shoot ProRes on the Blackmagic then I’d be fine with a decent thunderbolt HD for my footage…even if I end up with an Epic, if I didn’t use R3D, would I be ok?…I honestly I don’t know. And I’ve thought about an Epic (or Scarlet) recently…sill my overall reasoning to get the fastest HD for editing was because I was thinking if I had enough hard drive speed, I might could skip things like a RedRocket…but honestly Eric, I just don’t know yet. I haven’t edited since college, but its all I’ve thought about. I’ve saved what I could over couple years in hopes of shooting a feature and submitting it to film festivals as I would have done if I went to Tisch (sorry for the mini life story, but I’m putting A LOT in this…figured I go hard and try to make it happen)…So…fastest hard drive as I can get equals future proofing myself…

[Eric Hansen]

Rome

I think you need to do some more research because you’re spending a lot of money on things that don’t matter.

According to the KataData app on my iPhone, the BMCC 2.5k raw at 23.98 is 120MB/s. Epic at 5k 2:1 at 5:1 compression is 80MB/s (which actually seems higher than I thought. I’ll double check this with some Epic footage tomorrow). These are more than doable with slower drives.

A Red Rocket accelerates de-bayering. It doesn’t have anything to do with drive speed. If you’re working in Premiere on a laptop such as the Retina MacBook Pro 15″ with a resolution of 1/8 or 1/16, you don’t need a Red Rocket to edit. If you’re editing on a modern tower with 8 or more cores, a Rocket doesn’t help much when you’re editing (typically). It helps a lot when you’re transcoding, grading or outputting a 4k image to a monitor.

Future-proofing in this industry is almost a fool’s errand. Especially with storage. Buy what you need for your project now and look out maybe a year into the future. Anything further than that is just a guess.

As far as the 4k BMCC, i wouldn’t bet on that until you have it in your hands. By then you’re post setup will probably have changed a few times.

in my experience, if you’re planning on shooting a feature, more space is much more important than more speed. Especially if you’re shooting raw formats. My last feature clocked in at 250TB. That’s a lot of J4’s

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Eric Hansen
Production Workflow Designer / Consultant / Colorist / DIT
https://www.erichansen.tv

[Rome Will]

Hey Eric my bad for the late response…but you’re right. I DO need to continue to do more research.

I think I’ve decided on the Red (b.c as you mentioned, the BMCC 4K will probably take a while)…now comes the biggest question of Scarlet vs. Epic…there’s a ton of info online and so far, the main thing I need to decide is whether or not I’ll be shooting slow motion…

As for the Red Rocket, I guess I misunderstood the product description and its purpose in a workflow. I see from your tag you’re a consultant- I really appreciate your advice! My setup is below…don’t need your advice just yet, as I want to research some more first…but for now, I think I’ll stick with the J4 as an external HD for my main footage. Still, I will definitely do more due diligence before I add any more pieces of equipment. My setup is for editing (what looks to be) Red Scarlet/Epic footage

MBP Late 2011, i7 w/16gb of memory (2.4 GHz quad-core w/the boost)
Apple Thunderbolt Monitor
Asus PA 248Q (for color grading, 2nd monitor)
Blackmagic Intensity Extreme
Pegasus J4 (w/4 500 gb SSD’s)
*soon to be Lacie 10GB Big Disk (for backup)
*soon to be Tangent Tk Element (just gonna get the center one)