between me and brandon i think it's fair to say we've received literally hundreds
of requests to weigh in on the controversy surrounding red digital
cinema and the expensive proprietary red
minimag media format that they sell for use in their cameras now it recently
came to light through gini meg a maker of third-party non-certified mags that
contrary to what red has been telling us over the years the red mini mag is in
fact not a special product that was
developed after countless hours of r d but rather a simple consumer SSD with an
interface adapter in a fancy enclosure now i had assumed that
people would lose interest in this story and i decided to just leave it alone but
it's escalated to the point where genetech's original video has gone viral
to the point where red ceo jared land has had to issue statements to the media
defending red's position and his products so then it's time to break our
silence and break this down for y'all
starting of course with a breakdown of our own 960 gig mini mag
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to kick things off we're gonna need a torx number six bit to remove the four
screws on the bottom of our red mini mag
step two pry open the aluminum enclosure
step four remove the interface adapter which as
you guys can see is just a simple pin to pin
connection adapter it's uh there's no logic built into it whatsoever
and step four five i don't know whatever step we're on
inspect the SSD which is uh there's your controller
there's your dram cache there's one two three four five six seven eight nand
flash module so this is a high capacity red mag it's a storefly 300 ce whatever
the hell that is so no in fact it is not special hardware
but this isn't a surprise to me and it shouldn't be a surprise to you now
shockingly i actually can't find any tear downs of red mini mags online
that weren't done in the last few days since this story broke
but i've known about this for years and i've
even complained publicly that red is selling regular old msata ssds out of
scene markups they're not even pci express
m SATA ssds in a fancy red enclosure oh
and you don't even get red it's like it's a black enclosure if you don't buy
the 480 or the 960 gig it just took until now to blow up
why well it seems to come from this video
from ginitech a small time maker of knockoff megs and that's actually the
biggest reason that i had intended to ignore this whole thing i have no desire
to draw attention to them especially because given what i know about social
media marketing it wouldn't surprise me if some of the outrage over this is
actually bots created by ginny tech themselves but whether that's the case
or not here we are so let's take a quick look at both the valid points and the
misleading arguments that they make in their video that they position as an
expose but that is ultimately designed to put pressure on red and then
ultimately sell you their product so right out of the gate they present forum
posts from red users about failed mags as evidence that jaredland's reliability
justification for the cost of a redmag is bullspit
now the problem with that is that without knowing the sample size
a dozen or even a hundred failures is
not necessarily an indication that there is a significant problem with product
quality or validation the second problem is the way that gini tech repeatedly
attacks red for their made in the usa
claims now red didn't meet the requirements and that's pretty scummy
but to their credit at least they backed down removing the message from their
site and their products so given that it is hypocritical at best for ginny to
hammer away at this point when their site still seems to suggest that their
products originate in the uk and as red actually alluded to in a
court filing ginnymag even used to make similar claims about their products
being made in the uk when their components are obviously sourced from
other countries in a similar manner now as for the 480 and 960 versus 512 gig
and one terabyte advertised capacity scandal
red really should have communicated this better but they also haven't said
anything outright false here the raw capacity of any 480 Gigabyte SSD is
gigabytes that's just the way that nand flash manufacturing works and it's up to
the integrator in this case vertian
to determine how much of that 512 gigs or one
terabyte as it were to allocate to spare area
spare area improves both performance and longevity now red never should have
advertised them as 512 gigs if all 512
gigs weren't accessible but they weren't
technically wrong because physically there is 512 gigs of flash on the drive
now as for the claim about the quality of the non-commodity media that red uses
so mine is a virgin storefly with some
toshiba nan chips on it it's fine and from an industrial brand
but neither the nand flash nor the controller is anything super special
of course a big part of red story is the firmware so then is that special
this is where things get a bit nuanced ginitech is 100 correct in asserting
that the commodity ssds that red's using contain standard firmware
but he doesn't say that they don't also contain extra bits one thing he doesn't
show in his video is that while the camera does recognize any random msata
SSD in a mag enclosure popped into the side of it it actually will not write to
it at full speed unless the user takes extra steps to fool the camera into
thinking that it is in fact a genuine mag
so the main problem that we run into here is ginitech's use of real
information that red's hardware and firmware are not in fact special to draw
a misleading conclusion no evidence is
actually given to demonstrate that these low-cost consumer-grade ssds
the camera's functionality and
the faking of customized firmware is
really no different from the way that an NVIDIA board partner fakes the model
number of their reference board to include their vendor information because
here's the thing once the product ships in a Gigabyte or
an evga box and is covered by that vendor's warranty rather than the
warranty of whatever factory built the launch boards for NVIDIA it is in fact a
Gigabyte or an evga or an ASUS product
even if the different model number basically amounted to altering a couple
of strings in the firmware so that it's detected by the software correctly a red
meg becomes a red product not a verdian
or micron product as soon as red ships
it to you with their support attached to it no foul play
at least that would be the case if red hadn't been so disingenuous about the
way that they've marketed these things over the years
now i've been fairly focused on the way that gini tech has misled the cinema
community and massaged their message up till this point but red is far from
blameless here let's change gears now as a techie i'm not too offended by
some of red's claims for example that a physical adapter couldn't have been
created between the original redmag and the current minimag
it could have been done quite easily given that both of them are just msata
ssds in a whoops fancy machined box
but the thing is adapters do add more points of failure and i wouldn't
necessarily want to support that either so whatever
the one thing that really annoys me is reds claim that they spend millions of
dollars on r d around their media recording now if red is talking about
red code raw their proprietary compressed raw file format
sure i'll buy that it's kind of awesome
but ginny tech makes a very fair point in their video pointing out that the
customer already paid for red raw when they
bought the camera the red mini mag uses
nothing but a standard SATA interface
and red would be crazy to use anything other than SATA because SATA which has
had millions of dollars spent on its development just not by red is so well supported
across multiple platforms including the cameras that record to them and the pcs
and macs that need to read from them during footage ingest
the other really offensive thing that jared hasn't been entirely forthright
about is exactly what aspect of red's
firmware development has been infringed by ginitech
in spite of all the evidence to the contrary he still seems to be
at least suggesting that it is some kind
of proprietary SSD firmware
algorithm but it seems far more likely
to me that it's simply a drm scheme
now to be clear from a legal standpoint that makes him right
his product has been infringed just
not in a way that makes me feel bad for him at all calling the way that the meg is written
to red's own is misleading at best
let's break down how it works this is a really nice video from jersey
filmmaker covering the unusual way that red writes video files to a meg
basically every time you press the record button
you create a folder instead of a single
large clip and that folder is going to be full of as many four gig files as it
takes to record the footage until you press stop your editing software then
automatically stitches these many clips together
now if you've been around the block as many times as i have you'll know that
this is nothing but a simple work around for the four gig file size limit of the
fat32 file system fat32 is desirable for
its simplicity its high throughput and
of course it's cross-platform compatibility
but it's the furthest possible thing from red's own
and red's own way of doing things has other archaic workarounds too instead of
allowing an individual clip to be deleted from the mag after a bad take
for example red requires that the entire
mag be formatted before use now their claim is that this is to
protect the user from accidental deletions but as far as i can tell it's
just to compensate for their basic ass ssds
here's the thing a full format with security race reduces the write speed
penalty that comes with overwriting previously used flash cells
so it's pretty much a cost saving measure which is kind of sad when you
consider how widely available better ssds that would not require this
limitation are these days so yeah repackaging commodity products and
marking them up 10 times upsets me but
ultimately as a customer nobody is forcing me to buy this
it's not like i don't know the price ahead of time so i don't have a ton of
ground to stand on no the thing that has always really pissed me off is their
nonsense about how much they managed to
spend on r d without coming to the same
basic conclusion that the entire storage
industry came to decades ago nothing
is perfect not your consumer thing not your server grade thing nothing is
perfect and for anything to be truly
professional grade it must have
redundancy now red admits outright that they spend
a lot of time performing data recovery services on their customers media so to
me then that would indicate that they are well aware that their media does in
fact fail i do applaud their efforts to help their customers recover their data
not everybody does this but the issue for me is that data
recovery is an ass backward solution and
when i read a statement like that from a company's ceo i can't help but think
that red has weighed the cost of data recovery against the cost of actually
engineering a more robust solution
and decided you know what it's just not worth it to create something better
they've determined that putting your footage at risk is worth it compared to
the cost of engineering a raid 1 mag solution that would only increase their
cost per meg by about double which we can see that they could easily
absorb while almost never requiring data
recovery which guys even if you do get the footage back causes stress and lost
productivity that their customers will never get back anyway
nothing here was a revelation to me and i find both genie tech's motivation here
and the way that this has suddenly blown up highly questionable
but red has never put me in a position to feel bad for them so from my
perspective guys you are reaping what you've sown
these are the dangers of magic black box
marketing once the illusion fails people feel justifiably betrayed and pissed off
so i would recommend being honest in the first place next time usually the
engineering is cooler than the magic story anyway and if it's not
engineer it better next time like with real-time redundancy for my footage
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