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Workflow for Long-form HPX2000 Doco and P2?
We’re considering buying the HPX2100 for a specific job that will involve lots of shooting over a four week period. I’m anticipating that we will fill all five slots with 8-gig cards (or 16gb’s if can get some early ones).
I’ve thought of taking a bunch of Seagate 80gb SATA2 drives on the shoot and dubbing/transferring the material out of the camera at night back at the hotel. Essentially the HDD’s would be like camera tapes or data packs if you like. But I’m worried about backup. I’d probably get nervous and make another HDD copy of the transferred material via the laptop, meaning I’d have two drives of every day’s shoot, bulky yet safer do you think?
For someone coming from a tape environment this is all a bit spooky. I couldn’t afford one stuffup in data management as reshooting is out of the question.
Has anyone here done extended away shoots with lot’s of lots of shooting with P2?
Peter Corbett
Powerhouse Productions
http://www.php.com.au -
8 Replies
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Yes, and your plan is good. An upgrade I would consider is getting a two disk enclosure and make a mirrored Raid1 array. It can slow transfer times a little, but you will be creating redundancy right there in one pass.
The two drive firmtek boxes are great for this:
https://www.firmtek.com/seritek/seritek-2en2/
Also, if you need to give a set to a client or producer type, you each have your own copy.
Jeremy
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Thanks Jeremy,
The trick would be to have a USB 2.0 connection rather than Firewire, then I could use the host mode of the HPX2000 to dump directly to the enclosure. I suppose the RAID-1 would have to be set up on a laptop first. Not sure what the implications are using host mode to transfer material out of the camera to a stand-alone RAID box.
On a 21 day shoot, I’d end up with over forty hard drives which has me pretty concerned from a workflow point of view.
Peter
Peter Corbett
Powerhouse Productions
http://www.php.com.au -
[Peter Corbett] “On a 21 day shoot, I’d end up with over forty hard drives which has me pretty concerned from a workflow point of view.”
Welcome to the tapeless world. Another thing you can do is buy less drives at higher capacity to cut down on the number of drives. 40 – 80Gig drives is 3.2TB (whatever that translates to formatted). You can get 4 or 5 750Gig drives and have the same amount of space in a significantly smaller package.
Transferring from the camera is a way to do it, but I always use a laptop to do my transferring as I prefer the RAID1, and being untethered to the camera. It’s definitely not the only way to do it, it’s just the way I do it. I don’t have any experience putting the camera in host mode. That way would work, but you would have to make a manual backup and not a RAID1. I don’t think the camera would be able to attach to a RAID, but it’d be worth a shot. I would plan on having someone managing just the data with a computer, unless you have a bunch of p2 stores around.
Jeremy
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Nice points Jeremy. Taking 750gb’s or the new 1tb drives if available would be better for traveling. As long as the file naming system works in the HPX2000 so you don’t get duplicate file names every day after the cards are wiped.
The just have a nice padded Pelican for shipping. The soundo or producer could keep one set as you say, while on location. Probably safer than a single set of camera tapes.
With host mode, I could dub off say 70gb to the first drive, then plug it and a second drive and do a copy. Same result as a RAID, but maybe it would be slower?
Peter
Peter Corbett
Powerhouse Productions
http://www.php.com.au -
[Peter Corbett] “As long as the file naming system works in the HPX2000 so you don’t get duplicate file names every day after the cards are wiped.”
As long as it works like the HVX, ths shouldn’t happen at all and I wouldn’t worry about it.
[Peter Corbett] “With host mode, I could dub off say 70gb to the first drive, then plug it and a second drive and do a copy.”
Yep, you could do that, but the camera will be down as you transfer. And yes, it will be slower. You will be copying 70Gigs twice instead of writing two sets of 70 gigs at one time.
Make sense?
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[JeremyG] “Yep, you could do that, but the camera will be down as you transfer. And yes, it will be slower. You will be copying 70Gigs twice instead of writing two sets of 70 gigs at one time.”
But then if you host unload to the laptop first, then transfer to the Raid, that’s two transfers as well. I think? 😉
Peter
Peter Corbett
Powerhouse Productions
http://www.php.com.au -
You are right, but I don’t do the host transfer mode.
I have a laptop connected to a SATA raid 1 and use a p2 store as an expensive card reader and also a backup unit if I can’t have a laptop and sata raid in the field.
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On my recent trip to Japan, I would dump P2 cards into a P2 Store. The P2 Store was in a bag slung over my shoulder so it was a good chance to stress-test the P2 Store and see how it handled real-life, run-and-gun file transfers.
At the end of the day, I used P2 Genie to transfer the contents of the P2 Store to a 500-gig dual-drive Firmtek system set up as a mirrored RAID.
Each day’s footage was in its own folder to keep it all organzied. And each P2 card was renamed by P2 Genie to reflect the date it was shot as well as the sequence. Since the date feature in P2 Genie doesn’t work, I simply assigned an eight-digit number as the date. For example the first card shot on April 28, 2007 would be 20070428_001. The next would be 20070428_002, etc.
We were on a bus tour so each night the RAID would be packed into a small Pelican case that was packed into my suitcase.
Didn’t lose a single frame of material.
This wasn’t an assignment, either. It was vacation home movies. So you know how important THAT is! 🙂
Dean Sensui — Imagination Media Hawaii
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