So I've finally had some time to sit down with the R2E from Cool Camera Gear and do some speed test...

First off: the setup.  For dumping cards/drives we use a Macbook Pro Core2Duo 2.16 with a Tempo 32 expresscard from Sonnet.  Attached to this we have a five bay SATA enclosure with 1TB 7200RPM drives.

The R2E cable is very well built.  It has high quality connectors and the outer casing is very durable so it will be able to stand up to the riggers of set life.    It's about 3 feet long, which is a pretty good length.  long enough that you can easily have stuff plugged in, but far enough that it doesn't get in the way.

The Test: After plugging in the red drive to it's AC adapter (don't forget it at home or this won't work!) I plugged it in, and the drive was recognized within seconds.  So I dumped over 86.03 GB of data into the enclosure.   It completed the transfer in: 21:47. So that's about 4GB per minute, so a full drive would take about 80 minutes.
Connected through FW800, as seems to be the case with a lot of Red Drive owners, took a little bit to finally connect and be recognized.  The 86.03GB of data transfered to the drive in 23:00 which is about 3.5GB per minute.  So a full drive should take about 90 minutes to transfer.

Pros:
Faster transfer speeds.
High quality cable, firm connections will give years of trouble free use
FW bus is freed up to handle enclosures, CF Card drives, or other camera systems (ie. HVX, etc). Don't have to worry about the FW port on the drive failing, and being stuck

Cons:
Price.
Requires need the drive's external power supply


Recommendation:    The cable is a high quality piece of gear that allows you to free up the FW ports on your notebook for other purposes.  The value of the speed increase depends on your environment.

After each setup we like to take a look at the footage to make sure that there are no problems before moving on - our equivalent of "checking the gate".   Getting better performance off of the drive so that you can see the footage better and shaving even a little bit of time off of transfers can be extremely valuable.

 

So for us, this cable will become a valued part of our Red kit.

Aside from the lenses, there were a couple of other interesting things from RED at NAB.

I must admit, being able to see RED RAY in action was pretty amazing.  Especially after seeing it side by side with uncompressed 4k.

  Now it's true that I was a little ways away from the screen, but it was amazing.  The detail, the color... With a bit rate of 10 (vs 25 for miniDV), this has the potential to be revolutionary.  As more details come out it will be interesting to see where the technolgy leads.

 

Red Rocket was also annouced just before NAB, and this sub-$5k box will decode, debayer and play high quality real time 4k at 3fps (5k 25fps).  Works with PR, AE, FCP, and all red products.  Red workflow will now be quick and easy.

Of course we also looked at the new Scarlet and Epic mock-ups, and things are looking pretty good.   At first I was concerned because there were mini-xlr outpus on one of the modules, but I was assured that the "pro" version would be full size.  My advice to potential buyers - get the full sized XLR. It might add a couple of millimeters to the length of the camera, but that's worth it IMO to be in line with a universal standard.

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Hopefully you were able to follow Dan on twitter to get a brief look at what NAB 2009 and now had to offer.  Now that we've had some time to analyse things a bit better (and catch up on all the work that was waiting when we got home), we will be posting our reflections on what interested us the most, and what is the most important to the Red community.

 The first thing I would like to comment on was the new recording device from AJA- the Ki Pro.

 

 

From a non-Red perspective, the advantage is obvious.  Up until now Sony and Panasonic have protected their high end camera systems from being canabalized by crippling their low end system. 

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