handing off EX-3 footage

[Ed Kukla]

nasty suprises with CF cards? I hope the millions of professional still photographers who use CF know about this.

[Chris Cardno]

The issue is the write speed, not the actual CF card technology. There are already some questions about which cards and readers you can and can’t use — I’d hate to tell a client that the shoot was a bust because we cheaped out on the recording media.

As for data wrangling, we’ve been lucky so far in that the clients who have requested tapeless know and understand the workflow, they are willing to wait for the transfer. However, with the transfer speeds being what they are, and we usually have the MacBook ready to go, the last card is usually dumped before the producer has finished schmoozing with the interviewee, grabbed his jacket, run to the bathroom and returned the 12 very urgent calls that came in during the 20 minute interview… 🙂

The one rule we do have, though, is that the client either brings their own hard drive or they are going to be buying one of ours — we don’t do returns.

[Don Greening]

[Chris Cardno] “The issue is the write speed, not the actual CF card technology.”

Absolutely. The requirements for variable bit rate MPEG2 recording are quite different than the requirements for “millions of professional still photographers” using a third party CF card. Sony is testing these CF cards all the time and they’ve yet to put their seal of approval on any of them because they fail to meet the requirements for sustained transfer rates.

This is why JVC has adopted the SxS Pro Memory Card technology with a license from Sony and will be using it with future video cameras.

– Don

[Ed Kukla]

Sorry, I misspoke…it’s SDHC cards that are being used with success in the EX cameras.

[Curt Pair]

We do the same thing as Steve Wargo. We buy a small USB hard Drive, and copy the ENTIRE BPAV folder to the drive.

I’ve made small text files to include the info: Shoot date, format, frame rate, crew names/contact etc.

I’ve also gone the “folder” with the name/format route.

You can also purchase stickers from Pro Label that can be filled out, and then taken off at a later date (non-permanent).

Just find a route that works for you and more importantly, your client.

I couldn’t agree more… DO NOT GIVE THE CARDS TO THE CLIENT! We’ve had some “other types” of flash media take as long as two months to get back, and the client refused to pay for the “rental” of the cards.

Curt Pair
Picture This Productions
Sony ICE Team
F900/F350/700/EX1/EX3/D790/D600
Adobe Premiere Pro CS3 HD/Matrox
Phoenix, AZ

[Simon Wyndham]

I have been thinking about this dilemma a lot recently. It has occurred to me that if you use the SDHC recording method instead of SxS you could just hand over the card at the end and just charge it as media. The cost of the types of SDHC cards that work with this method are not hugely different to the cost of XDCAM discs a couple of years ago. Admittedly you may be talking £25 for 16GB rather than £20 for 23GB (a couple of years ago. The discs are much cheaper now). But I still think it is very doable.

[Don Greening]

[Simon Wyndham] “But I still think it is very doable.”

Absolutely, although most of our clients are using post houses that have not started down the shining path of tapeless acquisition yet. They’re still stuck in Mini-DV and DigiBeta land, so we apprach each project by first finding out what they can edit with and end up cross converting to a more widely used format. We put that on a FAT32 formatted USB hard drive (usually on site) and build the cost of the drive into our price.

– Don

[Joe Tyler]

My solution. I have my PC based laptop with a built in Express card reader and dual hard drives. I copy all data simultaneously to both drives. Remove the second drive (single screw in bottom of laptop), place hard drive into a shell and hand off. 80GB ~ $20. Any client can handle that. The custom laptop ran about $1400 from HP.
The hard drives can be mounted on the editor’s computer and has a USB 2.0 connection.

hope that helps

[Ed Kukla]

“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.”

I was re-reading this thread and caught that comment.
I’ve been a professional cinematographer for about 20 years and I never edit. I specialize in making nice pictures for good clients and they hire professional editors to put another set of eyes to the project. Kind of like they do it in real life. Your post makes it sound like us who work like this are ‘hungry for work’. If I was illiterate of this business I’d say you are describing a jack of all trades and master of none. But I won’t go there, I’m sure that doesn’t apply to all the ‘videographers’ out there.