card management

[valladao65]

I'm curious how everyone is handling the management of the cards on a shoot. We were shooting at full 1080 with 6 - 16gig cards and you basically needed someone there to do nothing but keep track of cards.
It was just too easy to lose track of what had or hadnt been downloaded.
I went in thinking I was going to be so careful and organized, but in the heat of the shoot, it was just too easy to mix things up - especially since I was wearing so many hats that day.

Are you using dry erase on the cards as they go?
How do you keep from getting the cards mixed up?
I have a mini heart attack everytime I actually format a card for fear of losing everything.

We were also using the P2 store to transfer to a hard drive and that got confusing as well. I actually lost the data off a whole card because I accidently transfered a card stored on the internal hard drive instead of the data on the card. (they look exactly the same with the contents folder and last clip file)
Do you have to go into the folders and check the file names of both the card being copied and the copied files everytime to be sure you have the correct data?

Any thoughts would be a tremendous help.

Thanks!
Mike

 

[Barry_Green]

USE THE WRITE PROTECT TAB. It simplifies everything.

When you eject a full card, STOP and immediately write-protect it. If you're the P2 Technician/offloader, do not accept a card from the cameraperson unless it's write-protected.

If it's write-protected, that means it needs to be offloaded. You can't format it if it's write-protected, and if you try you'll get an error, which will remind you to offload that card.

Once you successfully offload the card, eject it, unprotect it, and format it.

Unprotected cards = empty cards. Write-protected cards = full cards that need to be offloaded.

 

[Matt Gottshalk]

In addition to pulling the tab, I put a piece of BRIGHT RED GAFF TAPE over the open end of the p2 card case( got this from my film days)....definitely helps in knowing which cards are used w/o staring through the somewhat translucent plastic looking for a little orange box.