Fastest way to transfer during live shoot

[Ben Cohen]

Well, I promised I’d come back and give a recap of how it went:

We had 5 HVX200s and 1 HPX500. We had 3-4 P2 cards for each camera (a mixture between 4,8,16 & 32 GB). We strategically gave the cameras that were harder to access for our PAs the 32 GB. We had 3 computers with 1TB each for storage. I had 2 people transfer footage nonstop by creating Disc Images from each card. I found this be extremely smart (a suggestion from my Producer). This allows us to keep the footage at it’s most pure state as a backup forever, rather than transfering everything to HD. I’m not sure if this saved time, although I think it did purely because the folks doing the transfer didn’t have to deal with Final Cut or any software during their workflow.

I had very trustworthy, experienced and focused people doing this transfer for me so I didn’t need to worry about it all day.

Thanks for all the advice from Creative Cow, this was my first P2 experience and it worked flawlessly. Now I have a lot of HD footage to edit. I’ll come back again in a few months and give a plug to the final product which should be in stores near you soon.