[Dan Geller]

I use the PortaBrace smuggler for our HDX-900 and have traveled the world with it. The lens and viewfinder need to be removed and put into the soft bags included with the purchase. When the case is in “travel” mode, it’ll fit the new size-wise regulations. When you’re off the plane, the rear panel and a side viewfinder panel expand to allow for a quick-draw style of lugging. When expanded and with our HDX-900 re-assembled with it Fuji zoom the camera is too long to fit in the case with battery attached – so we carry a battery in the side pocket.

[Dan Geller]

Things to note about tapeless. If I could keep the P2 cards as archives through an entire shoot of 6 weeks, then I’d be on board. But that’s way too expensive. Point 2: either I hire a data wrangler for 6 weeks at huge expense on a remote location, or I risk making transfer mistakes when exhausted from a long day of shooting. Point 3: hard drives are in no way archival devices. They are fragile. They also will fail sitting on a shelf or in use. That’s why we have a pricey Quantum Superloader3 LTO robot to archive to the government/financial industry standard archival medium. All our media is on RAID 50 Rorke HDX Galaxy systems and backed up to LTO3. We’re pretty thorough about this stuff.

All to say, we’ve been in the digital domain since 1993 and have been on the bleeding edge of many technologies, helping to push the industry to more efficient and cost-effective tools. The tapeless workflow fits for productions with a data wrangler, or with limited nightly transfers, but is a bad fit for the many situations described in posts above. When the flash storage price drops to make it a commodity, then those of us in a huge portion of the industy will go tapeless. Red’s CF approach, by the way, is appealing for the relatively generic media it can use from several vendors – competitive storage pricing pressures!

[Dan Geller]

The OMF exporter (extra bucks to purchase) worked OK for me when getting a show out for mixing elsewhere. 2 hours is probably too long to run out at once – we broke the show into 6 timelines (reels). The audio nodes should come across. ProTools is all over the place as far as compatibility and versions. The mixer who did our job tranalated our OMFs into the Sadie audio system using some tool box OMF utility that allowed him to adjust for versions and the like. We re-imported the mix as AIF file stems (dialogue, narration, music, sfx) with a sync pop – his audio processing and plug-ins would never have flown back into M100i or 844x. As I recall, the OMF exporter has some compability settings to play with – run some tests of different settings and see what moves over to ProTools most seamlessly.