Camera Master Deliverable Issues… any suggestions?

[Jeff Carson]

Fastest, cheapest, lowest headache, slightly risky method:

Copy everything to $170 firewire drives. Give them to your client with the clear understanding that you are not responsibe for the care of the drives or their performance when it leaves your door. They can decide if they want a backup of those files (which you should encourage).

[Izoneguy]

No need to go to tape….
Your files are already digitized…
Archive the P2 contents on two drives…
keep one and give the other to the client…
If they are running FCP, it is easy
to import the P2 contents into FCP…
If they are on AVID or Edius the same is true..
You need to do some client education
because going back to tape is a waste
of time on both ends….
I have clients who are PC only
and can log and give me notes using
the Pana P2 viewer…
For some we buy a new dedicated Firewire
800 drive that contains the P2 contents
and all the Quicktime files…
Still figuring this out as we go
but an expensive tape deck is not part
of our solution….

[Manny Kivowitz]

Thanks guys, I agree firewire is agreat great solution (except when the drives die and I’ve experienced that several times now) but I’m afraid the amount of material would be daunting. I guestimated that each 1 hour episode will be cut from nearly 60 hours of material (lot’s of 2 & 3 camera interviews) and if captured at 720p30 would yield roughly 1.62tb of data per episode. As it is we’d have to greatly increase our xsan storage just to handle daily workflow.

That’s why I was considering the tape solution and while trying to educate/convince a network that they need to reconsider their deliverable requirements, the battle would no doubt be uphill.

Keep ’em coming…. all ideas welcome. Any info on P2 & Firestore ingest times would be very welcome.

[Rennie Klymyk]

[kskstudios] ” I guestimated that each 1 hour episode will be cut from nearly 60 hours of material (lot’s of 2 & 3 camera interviews) and if captured at 720p30 would yield roughly 1.62tb of data per episode.”

Given this volume over this much time you would think an investment in a panasonic 1200 or 1400 hd deck would be warrented (providing your client also has one at their end). However useing these figures, when you look at the cost of tape for the 60 hrs of footage you are looking at aproximately $20.00 per 33 min. of footage = $2400.00 in tape costs per episode. 500 GB HDD’s are down to about $200.00 each I’ve heard so the 1.6 tb would fit on 4 drives = $800.00 and there is no logging or real time laying off to tape. If this math is correct you could make a duplicate backup on HDD’s for about $1600.00 as oppossed to
$2400.00 for tape, a 33% savings plus a huge savings in time.

60hr. = 120 – 33min. tapes @ $20.00 = $2400.00
1.6 TB = 4 – 500GB HDD’s @ $200.00 = $800.00
1.6 TB = 8 – 500GB HDD’s @ $200.00 = $1600.00 (with duplicate back-up)

I haven’t researched these prices but rather fished them off the top of my head as food for thought. Although no one can deny owning one of these decks would be a real asset that’s another $20,000.00 + for the equation.

[Richard Sutcliffe]

Our experience has been inconsistent with transfer times from P2 to powerbook/FW800 drives. In theory and in tests it took between 6 and 7 minutes to transfer a full 8gb card to the FW drive. In practice (this was a live event over three full days) the transfer times began to increase as the shoot progressed. But it wasn’t consistent and the increases were huge. with the exactr same hardware/software setup we saw some of our transfersincrease from 6 to between 12-15min. the very next card, writing to the same drive would take 6mins again. Unfortunately I haven’t had the opportunity to investigate why this might be but it could have had serious ramifications for us if we had needed to turn our cards around quicker.

So the short answer is 6-8mins but if you only have 6-8mins you could end up in trouble.

Incidentally USB2 was a complete dog for us. Dont know if it is Mac specific this issue but I would never consider using a USB2 drive again, only FW800.

[Manny Kivowitz]

That spike in xfer rate could be super significant, considering that I’ve heard quite often that real world captures on 8gb cards runs in the 15-16min range. 1 for 1 xfer rates would be far less than ideal, especially if you need to recycle those cards in the field.

Thanks!

Good heads up on the USB2 issue, I’ve not had any experience with them yet but I would not have imagined it to be such an issue. Was it just one drive?

[Richard Sutcliffe]

Yeah it would pay to be prepared for things not running entirely to schedule. I should add we were copying the cards to LACIE 250gb drives, I would add that you might be copying cards to a SATA RAID in half the time it took us, making two copies at once and never have any spikes in the xfer time. One of the new workflow issues we must all take account of is that everyone’s hardware setup will be different and this makes it hard to discuss things such as how long it takes to transfer a card.

With regard to USB2, it wasn’t just one drive but an iomega drive we had and a lacie porsche drive. Both were much slower than the FW800 and the iomega was at least twice as slow.