Best HD setup for the road... suggestions?

plexi

plexi

Active member
I'm about to leave for two weeks of shooting on the road, and will probably shoot 75 8gig P2 cards worth of footage. I've been importing from the cards into FCP on my PBG4, and then making an additional backup of the raw card contents. So looks like I'll need at least 1.2TB of storage, minimum.

Does anyone have any suggestions on what drive setup I should go with? They've obviously got to be durable since we're travelling every day. Should I get two large drives and save the FCP capture scratch on one, and the raw P2 files on the other? Or some sort of RAID setup?

Any thoughts would be much appreciated.

Cheers,

Gary
 
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How on the road are you going to be? ie. car or van; downloading in motel room.

I have a freind that is fitting a pelican case with a 2 TB hard drive. He is planning on adding ventalation and ports for the cables to run out the side so that the drive will even operate with the case closed. this would be good if you are going to be downloading on the go so that you don't have to worry about protecting the hard drive.
 
the footage will be trasferred on location (in offices, people's homes, etc.) or at night at the hotel. i guess my main concern is just carting the drives from country to country, the wear and tear factor. i've already had one glyph drive die on me, and i'm assuming it was from all the bouncing around, loading in/out, etc.

so i guess my question for everyone was, what brand/size of drives are the most durable and dependable in this sort of situation?

thanks!
 
I am doing an article on HVX field workflows, so would be very interested in your experiences. If you wish to share any of your successes/failures and wish to be quoted in a magazine article, please contact me via PM or email.

You might want to take a look at this line of ruggedized hard drives.

http://www.4tress.com/features.html

Otherwise, another option might be to purchase a several raw drives, like 500 gb Hitachi or Seagate drives. Do not put in an enclosure but use a Wiebetech drive dock just to attach to drive to transfer your raw P2 contents. Then put drive back in its antistatic bag and store the drive in a Pelican case in foam. So, just keep a Pelican of several drives. You might then want to have one large drive in enclosure which you transport in the van securely packed. When you edit, import from your P2 footage on the bare drives into FCP using this drive as your media drive. But whatever you do, I would definitely have 1 set of drives with raw P2 files and the other set as FCP media drives with imported footage.

Just my .02 here, but would certainly be interested in how it works out for you.

Good luck...

Ned Soltz
 
You might want to consider burning dvds every couple of days so you have your data on a more stable media as a backup.

I'd also think about Fedexing a drive home every 4 days or so.
 
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