C300: C300 MKII - External HD recommendations?

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seanarmada

Well-known member
I've got a few C300 MKII shoots under my belt now and I'm thinking about storage solutions. The USB 3.0 hard drives that I've been using for my C100 footage are becoming quite a hinderance in handling the data rates of the C300 MKII footage.

I'm curious what external hard drives you guys use?
 
If the data rate or transfer rate is the problem, you need to look at a solution with either Thunderbolt 2 (max 20Gb/s) or Thunderbolt 3 (max 40Gb/s). Or External PCI Express 2 x16 at max 64Gb/s. However; you need the hardware to support this. Unless your editing computer is fairly new, it probably will not. Also, keep in mind that these numbers reflect a perfect set-up. In real life, you are probably not going to see quite those numbers, but it should be possible to get close.

Otto
 
I pretty much only buy Seagate. Had to buy a Lacie a few weeks ago for a client, because they "had to have Thunderbolt" and that is pretty much the only off the shelf portable drive you can walk into Best Buy and get with TB. I actually have TB and esata connectors for Seagate drives, BUT they stopped making their drives with swappable connectors.
 
Not trying to be annoying but LaCie is owned by Seagate. When you buy a LaCie external drive, it has a Seagate HDD inside.
 
Thanks for the feedback guys! Seems like there's a mix. Eric: USB 3.0 drives are working fine for you?

To be fair I'm using a Macbook Pro mid-2014. It's maxed out specs wise with dedicated video and 16gb ram, but still I realize it's not as powerful as a desktop. Is it a bit of a lost cause trying to edit this footage on a Macbook?
 
seanarmada said:
Thanks for the feedback guys! Seems like there's a mix. Eric: USB 3.0 drives are working fine for you?

To be fair I'm using a Macbook Pro mid-2014. It's maxed out specs wise with dedicated video and 16gb ram, but still I realize it's not as powerful as a desktop. Is it a bit of a lost cause trying to edit this footage on a Macbook?
Click to expand...

I have the same laptop and I consider it the bare minimum of what is usable with XF-AVC 4k 10 bit. I just finished a 3 minute assembly of a project in Premiere at 1/4 resolution using this drive: https://www.bhphotovideo.com/c/prod...ology_0G02272_8TB_G_RAID_External_Hard.htmlin

It was OK provided I didn't edit too quickly, kept sequences short, used no effects and limited adjustment layers. I still ended up with a few crashes.

I did nightly previz for our creative team using the in-camera proxies in FCPX and it is totally fine. It's possible that 4k Prores would hold up a little bit in FCPX, but I could only get noisy/totally unusable footage out of the Atomos Flame.

For much beyond this simple editing, this laptop is way under-powered. Let alone when the nodes start to pile up in Resolve. I've been holding out on getting a workstation for quite some time. Going to wait a month and see if Apple releases a professional workstation in the next few months, despite all evidence to the contrary they will not. If not, I'm all set to switch to PC and get into Scratch for Prores transcodes and finally leave the Mac world behind.
 
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