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external hard drive storage – portablity+durability?
I have a question for shooters already on-location transferring P2 cards to hard drive backup while still in the field. Do you find that storage/backup is a problem on long shoots? Do you worry about HDD durability? Are you using 3.5 inch drives or 2.5 inch drives? Also, when transferring HD footage from camera to an external drive – how long does it take? Someone posted that it took about 7-8 minutes. Was that to a 3.5 inch drive or a 2.5inch drive? I asume 7200rpm but which Firewire chipset?
I ask because right now I am trying to prove that a P2 workflow in HD can work when travelling overseas (eight days of 1.5+ hours of footage a day) into remote locations. With tape, this was relatively easy. But since travel means bringing everything with us onto the plane, the task with P2 seems daunting. Has anyone accomplished this yet?
John McClary
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3 Replies
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We used Acomdata 60GB portable FW drives…simply because they have two firewire ports and can be daisy chained at a later date, for loading into the edit system. We also used LaCie Porsche drives. At first we used a PC laptop to transfer the footage, later we used a P2 Store, and when it was full transferred the data off. We used the 60GB drives because the P2 Sotre was 60GB and is was easy to keep track of our offloads.
2.5″ and 3.5″…shouldn’t really matter in transfer time. And they were 5400 RPM. These won’t be used for editing so there was no need for thee 7200RPM. Nice little bus powered drives are good for on location shooting.
Transfer time was about 4-8 min per 4GB card…the transfer of the P2 to the Acomdata drive was about 40 min.
Shane
Alokut Productions
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I’m glad to hear that transfers were fairly quick with 5400rpm drives – they definitely are cheaper. Someone earlier had posted that the faster the drive, the quicker the download but I have no direct experience either way….
The 2.5″ vs. 3.5″ drive debate really came down to durability. The current crop of 2.5″ drives can survive more vibration – 250Gs versus just over 60Gs of operating shock for 3.5″ HDD. That seems to make them more attractive while travelling.
https://www.barefeats.com/hard56.html
(at the bottom of the page)Did you use the P2 Store to avoid downloading straight from the camera or was there another reason? That does sound like the best way to go, I’m just trying to completely understand the logistics of it.
John McClary
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The first two shoots we had a PC Laptop and the Porsche drives. But that required that there be a technician there to handle the copying of the footage to the hard drives. The P2 Store is much simplier. On the third shoot we had this, and all he did is put the card in the device and press START. It took 4 min to download the footage…twice that really, because we ran it in VERIFY mode. so it was a put the card in, press a button and walk away. When they needed the card, they pressed a small button to format it and in two seconds, it was done, and they grabbed the card.When it was full, then they sat down and copied it off onto a 60GB Acomdata. Then reformatted the P2 store (need a paperclip to do that…nice way to protect against accidental erasure) and it was ready to go again. Ease of use was amazing.
The reason we went with the smaller drives is the bus powered ability, and the matching capacity. Made things simple. Didn’t think about the punishment factor. That is something to take into account, to be sure.
Shane
Alokut Productions
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