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handing off EX-3 footage
What methods are being used for quick in & out field shoots for freelance shooters?
Out of town producer wants to leave pronto to catch a flight, always running late. No time for transfering files. Easy way has been to hand off a tape and say thanks and goodbye.
Prices for the cards are coming down, I think it’s down to about $60/hour card. I can see just handing the cards off and requiring them to return the cards ASAP. Of course ASAP can mean different things to different people. I was thinking of a dayly rental rate on the cards, perhaps $10/day/card. They keep the card for 2 weeks and it will cost them. They have the option of bringing their own cards.
Are any of you out there freelancing with EX cameras? As these cameras get more popular, this will have to be addressed in some way. Data wrangling in the field is messy & time comsuming. Easy for bigger productions with a budget for a dedicated data wrangler but not good for run N gun doco work.
What are you doing in this regard?
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19 Replies
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16 GB cards are still $700 or so, they hold about 57 minutes HQ footage. So I am not going to stock to many of them.
I find that transfers to a FW800 portable drive is about 6 to 8 times faster than real time. About 10 min per hour of footage. This is reasonable.
I like the idea of field producers bringing their own or renting them, maybe from a rental house, and putting it on clients account. Rule charges $50 per day for a 16GB SxS or P2 card.
The problem may be convincing the client of this.
Olof Ekbergh
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How about transferring to 16 or 32gb USB Thumb drives? Will those work?
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I think that in the freelance world – many videographers are so hungry for work, that they are willing to transfer the SxS media to a hard drive for the client – and that’s considered the lightest amount of work, leaving the editing and post to some other party. The hope for most videographers is that they will also end up putting the acquired footage together to produce a complete video, and then bill accordingly.
For the slice of videographers who specialize in camera acquisition, it will likely be more about the scenario you’re describing, where they get the footage, or the interview, whatever – and then you could hand over the SxS card like you mentioned, except for those clients that do not work in the XDCAM workflow, they might be stuck.
I don’t know if this sounds too accommodating, but I’ve had a relatively easy time of turning footage around by simply bringing my Macbook Pro and a firewire hard drive, (which may not be necessary for shorter shoots), and quickly transferring the clips using XDCAM Transfer software over to a folder on my hard drive, and then I burn it onto a DVD disc or even a Dual Layer DVD. By doing this, your client can access the clips on multiple systems and various workflows.
That said, I may be part of the trouble as clients come to expect this service, but I doubt that I’m alone in the way I’m handling the scenario where a client wants to walk away with the acquired shots. It will be interesting to see what others say about this. -s
Stephen May
Keystone Media Productions
Freelance Videographer -
wow, this is entertaining; I’m responding to my own post!
What are you smoking – not much HD fits onto a DVD and only a wee bit more on a DL DVD! (actually I don’t have split-personality disorder…) Seriously, a lot of the stuff I do is often short b-roll clips that do fit onto DVD’s and DL DVD’s, but if you’re tasked with a talking head or long-doc format clips, obviously you’ll be pushed into a Blue Ray disc or some external hard drive that you hand over to the client.
Parting with your SxS card is not the way to go, plus it’s the XDCAM flow the client may not be up on, so it seems most reasonable to expense a drive (relatively very inexpensive) to the client. It can even be a USB2 drive as speed will not be key – they just need to move the files onto their system, not edit with it. So I agree with the earlier post about going with the drive and not the card. Keep the card, nobody gets your cards…
-s
Stephen May
Keystone Media Productions
Freelance Videographer -
Most of the times I hand off footage to clients at the end of a shoot they want Beta SP.
I have for years now kept them happy by fedexing a beta tape overnight, it will beat them back to the suite. And keeping the master for “safety”. Clients like this, and more often than not I will also land some post production from the shoot.
For really time critical stuff we use FTP and compressed uploads or posts on our server.
Olof Ekbergh
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We stock those small 160Gb Western Digital USB drives that we can now buy for around $60. We have the Sony USB express card drive and transfer during the shoot using a MacBook Pro. After we’re done, we dump the last card and they’re off and running. We simply charge for the drive like we used to charge for tapes.
Most often, we have then bring a drive with them. We transfer the entire BPAV folders and it’s their baby. Sometimes we arrange to leave a copy on our hard drive for 72 hours. Only once have we had to save someone with our backup. It was a $7500 wedding that we rented two EX-1s for and the guy dropped his hard drive, from about 6″ off the table. We had just called him to let him know we were just about to delete his files when he started screaming. He dropped the drive when he was answering the phone.
In the past, I had my doubts about having a client’s footage but it saved his bacon.
Steve Wargo
Tempe, Arizona
It’s a dry heat!Sony HDCAM F-900 & HDW-2000/1 deck
5 Final Cut (not quite PRO) systems
Sony HVR-M25 HDV deck
2-Sony EX-1 HD . -
I was about to add my 2 bits to this thread but then Steve posted his reply and said just about everything I was going to. Now I don’t have to type so much.
The very first thing you need to find out from your client is what they plan to edit the the XDCAM stuff with: Windows machine, Mac, which NLE they use, how recent is it, etc. etc. How they answer will determine how you hand them the XDCAM media.
To be compatible with the most number of post houses the hard drive should be formatted in FAT32, which is the formatting that can be read by both Mac and Windows platforms. Surprisingly enough, this is also the same formatting used by the SxS Pro memory cards. Then it’s just a simple matter of dragging the BPAV folder from the card over to the hard drive, which is now just a lot bigger version of a card but with moving parts.
[Ed Kukla] “Data wrangling in the field is messy & time comsuming.”
That’s subjective. With my Macbook Pro and a FW drive I can offload a full 16 Gbyte card in about 5 1/2 minutes. You’ve got what, an extra laptop bag with everything you need to transfer the cards in the bag. The big downer for tapeless as opposed to tape is that you can’t write on the hard drive you’re about to hand the client like you could with a tape cassette. Important stuff like recording format, tape number, etc. I guess you could email them a shot list later.
Like Stephen May has already said: “Nobody gets your cards.” But you can charge them for the hard drive. They get their money back if they return it and it’s still working.
– Don
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[Don Greening] “The big downer for tapeless as opposed to tape is that you can’t write on the hard drive you’re about to hand the client like you could with a tape cassette. Important stuff like recording format, tape number, etc. I guess you could email them a shot list later. “
Yes you can, create a new folder for each BPAV Folder and label it Card135mbs720 or Card225mbs1080 etc
Portable USB hard drives are the way to go, quick transfer and cheap price.
Steve Connor
Adrenalin TelevisionHave you tried “Search Posts”? Enlightenment may be there.
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It’s interesting that none of you responded to my comment that cards recording an hour can be had for under $100.
On another website there is described a well tested method of using CF cards that cost less than $60 with an adapter that fits the slots in the EX. Only hangup is you can’t shoot over 40 fps. Considering the cost of HD tape, this is just as cost effective and totally eliminates the need for data transfer. Don’t know if I am allowed to link to other websites. -
Ed, this seems to be dangerous, there are many instances of nasty surprises as to the performance of these cheaper cards. If Sony could do their card cheaper I’m sure they would. It’s like trying to save money on tape, it just might be a false economy. I’m going with a Drobo drive to off load the BPAV files pending editing. Probably will also need a cheap portable drive for field off loads if it’s a long shoot away from base.
Michael Slowe
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