External Hard Drive(s) and organization?

[David Roth weiss]

[Michael Dominic] “Should I buy one 8 TB drive or smaller drives? How do you all organize your footage?”

A more important question would be, how are you going to protect your footage?

David Roth Weiss
ProMax Systems
Burbank
DRW@ProMax.com

Sales | Integration | Support

David is a Creative COW contributing editor and a forum host of the Apple Final Cut Pro forum.

[Roger Poole]

That’s a hell of a lot of footage. There are lot’s of considerations, the first being your choice of 8TB of storage. For media use, drives shouldn’t go over about 75% full, also the formatted size of 8TB will be much less than 8TB, which will leave you with over full drives before you start editing, then you would need almost as much again for render files and final export.

Then, what interface will you be using. Whatever size of disks you have they need to be in a RAID configuration with a fast interface. The amount of footage you have is huge and if it is multi-cam footage you will definitely need fast storage to enable multiple streams in a multi-cam edit

The brand of drive enclosure is not the main consideration, it’s what is inside that is important. The make and model of the disks will be hugely important on a project of this size. “Enterprise” series drives would be my choice but bear in mind they are expensive and are designed to be left on 24/7 and also don’t withstand as many start/stop cycles as normal disks. Hitachi seem to have a good reputation but you’ll need to do your own research to find out what’s hot in the market at the moment as things change all the time.

Pro Res data rates here: https://provideocoalition.com/mcurtis/story/new_prores_info_data_rate_chart/

[Michael Dominic]

What do you mean?

[Michael Dominic]

I was thinking of using 4 4TB drives, one of which could be for project files.

[Michael Dominic]

I have several copies of my original footage, and I will make copies of the project files as I go.

[Shane Ross]

That’s not what he meant.

First off…make sure to back up your camera masters (if they are tapeless) to separate drives from the one you intend to edit from. I recommend archiving on TWO drives. I use bare SATA drives and a drive dock, and have two drives mirrored. Because hard drives fail…just a matter of time. That’s step one.

Then for editing, what he meant was RAID 5…meaning drives in a RAID where if one drive fails, the RAID is still intact. RAID 0 offers no protection, only speed. RAID 1 is slower, but more protected than RAID 5…just takes twice as many drives as each drive is mirrored.

You can get away with a RAID 0, or just a bunch of single drives…or a large array, as long as you Log and Transfer and backup your footage. If a drive fails…you just need to then reimport everything (FCP can do this automatically…BATCH CAPTURE). But this then eats into your edit time…considerably. Thus why a RAID 5 or RAID 6 or RAID 1 solution is good…if a drive fails, you can continue to edit, no downtime.

As for organization…man, I have a DVD out there on this topic, but it’s no longer available for purchase. Mainly because it’s designed for FCP 6/7…and those have been discontinued for 3 years now…old hat.

Shane
Little Frog Post
Read my blog, Little Frog in High Def

[Alan Okey]

A few questions:

What kind of Mac are you using? Laptop? Desktop?

What kind of storage interfaces do you have on your computer? USB? Firewire? Thunderbolt?

Will you be editing multicam sequences?

What are the specs of the ProRes footage you’ll be editing (frame size and frame rate)?

What is your budget?

[Michael Dominic]

Mid 2011 iMac 2.7 GHz Intel Core i5 with 16 gig ram.

It has all three of these, USB, Firewire, Thunderbolt.

No multi-cam. It’s all documentary footage.

The original MTS files are 1080, 23.98. I suppose this won’t change with prores.

My budget is whatever it is to by a reliable HD. I figure I can get this for around a grand.

[Michael Dominic]

Shane. I have my master MTS files on two separate drives and on a third at a friends house I case of fire or theft.

I am confused by the raid 0 – 6. My last doc was a while ago and shot on tape. I had two 100 gig array drive that ran me $3500 each.

What is my best preferably cheapest solution? My end product will be a 90 minute max feature doc.

Thanks.

[Nick Meyers]

Hi. Michael

This sounds a lot like take last doc I edited
We had over 7tb of HDV media (HDV is simpler as we edit with camera original)

We spread the media over 4 smaller FW drives, and had 2x duplicate systems,
So 8 drives in all.
We had a drive fail at some point mid-way, and we spent a day and a half copying its contents over from the dupe

I was cutting on one and an assistant worked on the other
They need to be constantly up dated as music and other media is added
There is software that can d this, but I’ve always done it manually

We kept our fcp projects on one drive, along with media
Renders from memory were also on the same drive.

We did have another copy of the media offsite (in another country in fact, where the on-ine was being done)

It doesn’t have to be difficulty you are sensible about it,

Good luck with the project
Nick