Fastest way to transfer during live shoot

[Richard Harrington]

You’ be pushing it….

‘d be sure to to sht something like 24PN to get maximum storage on the card….

You’ll also want to use multiple machines to dump to…

Richard M. Harrington, PMP

Author: Photoshop for Video, Understanding Adobe Photoshop, and ATS:iWork

[Jeremy Garchow]

Yeah, you really want to have 4 cards per camera. 2 shooting, 1 transferring media and a backup in case something goes down.

And you will need a transfer station per camera, as Richard suggested.

Jeremy

[Dave Neyman]

Ditto to what the others have said. It would help even to have a third card for each camera but it is really a disadvantage when the cards are not the same size.

[Ben Cohen]

Thanks, this is great help. I will rent additional P2 cards. Can anyone recommend their favorite P2 transfer method/equipment if I’m going to be dumping footage from 5 cameras throughout the day. I will have 2 laptops available on site – maybe more if I’m directed to do so.

[Brandon Lima]

I have a macbook pro and use an 34express to full size adapter. I can transfer a 32gb card is 16 minutes. For your situation I would say go for the panasonic card reader, you can load 5 cards into it a a time and from what I hear it is the fastest way to get data off the cards.

I always transfer straight to a raid system ( raid 1 ) and then at night copy onto a third hard drive.

hope this helps!

-Brandon

[Nate Stephens]

Ben, Are your cameras going to be on tripods, locked down to one position..

If so, why not Firewire to laptop ( I use MacBook Pro) capture via FCP to external mirrored esata raid…. I have recorded over 2.5 hours with NO problems in the studio..

You should be able to capture the show on a couple sets of 500gb esata drives per camera. I have a set of (cheap-n-dangerous) Calvary 500sata that were 100 bucks each.. I had them running for a week to see if they would fail, nope…

You need the laptops for P2 capture. You need the Hard drives for P2 off load.. So why not just use the laptops for video recorders…

[Ben Cohen]

That is a good idea, Nate. However, only 2 of 5 cameras will be on tripods and those will need to be semi-mobile because the concert is 10+ hours (I want to move the two tripod mounted cameras between sets to add some variety of shot perspective). So, I would have to deal with moving additional equipment on those two cameras. I would rather go the route of having a dedicated laptop/hard drive for each camera, except still use the dump and run method rather than the straight-to-FCP capture.

Still loving these suggestions though, so please, anyone chime in (see above for my upcoming project details) I promise to come back and update on how the shoot went to round out this case study.

[Nate Stephens]

Ben, I forgot to mention that I modified an old plastic AV cart for everything. Laptop, mirrored drives (2 sets, firewire and sata), wireless audio reciever, 4 channel audio mixer, 24″ LCD monitor-VGA, HD component and composite. I have a camera mono-pod that I have considered mounting to it and I have a large UPS battery with AC/dc converter that I have been meaning to test/time with the system. The UPS battery will power my Sony DXCwsl with DSR1 back and 4″ viewfinder for almost 4 hours. Oh, not to forget I have a 32 foot Granite Digital Firewire cable that works great.

It is all very mobile, all on wheels.. A remote pan/tilt head and zoom/focus would be a nice addition as would a cooler of very cold beer.. to sit on of course….

[Ben Cohen]

Sounds like a very solid set-up and makes more sense then what I was picturing based on your first post. Unfortunately this concert festival is one week from this Sunday and both budget and time will prevent me from building anything remotely close to that. I’m definitely going to rent some additional P2 cards as well as get as many laptop stations as possible based on Richard and Jeremy’s suggestions in the thread so each camera will have 3-4 cards to ensure that my dumping station has plenty of time between cards.

[David Hudson]

I would have one person just to run cards and one or two people off loading. Make certain they know the workflow back to front and blindfolded. Always write protect the cards before you put them in a machine. Did I mention P2 Genie?

When we do this every camera is numbered and has an envelope with it’s name on it to put shot cards in. These are picked up by the runner who delivers them back in the same envelope.
Don’t forget to clearly mark each card.

P2 is not the way to do this cheaply. You need a lot of folks.