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Freelancer work flow as an owner/operator of a HVX.
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The producers wanted a mini dv camera for surveilance video shots. They were going to make them Black and white. But when the director found out the hvx does 1080 as well, he wanted it for shooting unscripted, edgy, scenes. so we have been shooting whole scenes with camera and the stuff looks great. almost too good. I setup a wide shot with the sony f900 and one with the hvx and it was hard to tell the difference.
Todd McMullen
Flip Flop Films
Austin
Cinematography Forum Leader -
I was just talking about this with a D.P. friend of mine. he is obsessed with digitizing straight into FCP and I’m not. I told him that it might be sensible for some clients and shooting conditions, but certainly far from all. We hashed out a workflow that involves p2 cards, a p2 store, a cheap SATA enclosure, cheap SATA drives, and a cheap SATA cardbus controller. The workflow goes like this, shoot on P2, transfer to P2 store. At lunch or at the end of the day or whenever is most convenient, transfer the contents of the P2 store to the cheap SATA 2 disk RAID that is striped RAID 1. This will essentially write two copies of the p2 files to two drives at the same time. Your client on the other end has to have a cheap enclosure and SATA card or cardbus adaptor. You can then give them either both of the drives, or you give them one drive and you keep one. The drive then becomes the master and you keep the backup. If you try and insert just one drive, your computer will say that an incomplete RAID is present, but all of the data will still be there. At that point your client could choose to rebuild the array (making a new copy) or they can start to enter the footage into their NLE which then copies the material again. It is then their job to backup from their. If the poop hits the fan, then you have a backup from the original two drives. This is untested, unproven, but it’s what we are working on. So far so good and further testing is happening everyday.
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Jeremy,
[JeremyG] “At lunch or at the end of the day or whenever is most convenient, transfer the contents of the P2 store to the cheap SATA 2 disk RAID that is striped RAID 1. This will essentially write two copies of the p2 files to two drives at the same time.”
This is something I’ve been thinking of myself. I’m pretty sure it would work. A friend of mine had an XP computer go down with a raid 1 Sata in it. He pulled one of the drives out and put it in another computer and found that he could access the drive just fine. This is the only kind of redundant hard drive backup that some clients are gonna accept, where you give them one and hold on to the other until the client has done whatever backup they will do. It’s a little more expensive than tape initially but can be used over and over once the workflow is established to everyone’s satisfaction.
Ron Shook
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Yeah, i know it works as I tried it with two dissimilar firewire drives just to test the theory. I have a powerbook SATA rig coming soon as soon as supplies arrive to the dealer. And as far as it costing more than tape, you can get 300 Gig SATA drives for just over $100 at places like NewEgg. 300 gigs will get ya roughly 12.5 hours of 720p24 Native material (if my math is correct). So for just over $200 you can have 12.5 hours of material to your client and a back up sitting on your shelf. That can’t be much more than tape. Hell, a box of tape for our SDX900 (dv50) camera runs about 100-120 bucks or so and that’s only 5.5 hours maximum record time. If you apply these prices to DVCPRO HD tape, it’s gotta be cheaper. Clients will most definitely be attracted to that. The biggest part of this whole situation is convincing them that this is an okay way to do it. Also, what happens if your client is editing on a PC and your drives are formatted for a mac? Lots of wrinkles to be ironed out.
Jeremy
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If they are PC and you are MAC…
Most production people I know are
MAC & PC. I FAT format drives for
PC people. I copy from my G-raid
to the FAT formatted drive. I also
make a DVD-R back-up from each
P2 card. A lot faster than making
a bunch of BetaSP dubs…. -
Forgot to add,
that way the PC folks can copy the info they
need to there system. I would not edit from
the FAT formatted drives. These are for
transfer and back-up only.
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