Component Questions

C

Cole_Drumb

New member
Hello,

I am shooting a feature in digital and have component questions during filming and editing.

Camera: HVX200 w/ 16gig p2 card qty: 2.
Editing: Mac Pro w/ FCP HD.
Issue: On set storage. While on-set I will need to rotate footage from P2 cards into portable storage drives.
Question: What portable drives are recommended?
Thoughts: 2 portable 80 gig drives...


Editing: Mac Pro with FCP HD.
Question 1: What type HDs (RAID?) and HD configuration should I look at for all raw footage storage and especially safekeeping?
Question 2: How best to utilize the internal 4-slot HD's within the Mac Pro while editing?


Many thanks, this is a great site.
 
Portable Drives: Acomdata ONDAGO drives are what I used. Got them at Fry's. Also used bus powered G-Raid Minis.

HD RAID for editing: I use the CalDigit S2VR Duo eSATA drive and love it. I have two units running 2.5 TB. Other eSATA drives you can look at are Sonnet 500P, and Firmtek offerings. You can also use Raided firewire drives like the Firewire VR or G-Raid 2...just bear in mind that the G-Raid 2 is not daisy chainable, where the firewire VR is (perfromace dips dramatically...65MB/s down to 16MB/s). Those are you external optiion....HOWEVER...

Use the internal bays first. SATA drives in those bays work great. They don't even need to be RAIDED, but doing so will make them faster and get you more realtime performance. You can only use 3 drives for this, as one drive will have to be used for the OS.
 
I appreciate the recommendations.

I am shooting a documentary which means I am anticipating a larger amount of footage than a standard 3:1 or even 4:1 feature.

I need to determine, and would like your thoughts on, what the best set-up will be for storing that large amount of footage, including full back-up at all times, and editing with output to EDL.

Thanks for your time,
Cole.
 
Cole,

We're working on a pair of docs here right now, both with an excess of 500 hours of footage. One is over 600 as best I can tell. So biggest thing I'll recommend over anything else, is have good loggers. FCP can be tough to yield if you have a large amount of footage to wrangle. But if its logged well (detailed), then you can use a good database system like Filemaker to help your searches.

As for the setup, we use a server and San and go fibre out to the work stations. It works quite well. Allows for a lot of flexibility in that the editors and even directors can all access the footage at the same time. So while the editors are cutting, the directors can scan through tapes using FCP (WAY faster than DVD or VHS dailies) and get the editors missing/better/etc. shots quite quickly.

If you're only using one cutter and the director doesn't need access to the digitized footage, then any good raid setup will do you fine. As long as its one of the raid options with mirroring as part of it. Then just buy a couple of spare drives to swap in if any do die on you (we've had the best luck buying all of the exact same drives at the same time so the ones we swap out for failed drives are exactly the same). Lots of options there for that (internal or external). You just to need to then figure out your storage needs (so what size of drives to get).

cheers.
 
Cole,

Need more info... what are you going to shoot your feature on??? NTSC, DCP PRO 50, which HD? All play a part in doing the math... 2 80GB portables won't last long in any of these. Hopefully, I'm not telling you anything you don't already know.

"Paint is Paint" "Storage is Storage"... In my opinion, you're going to run into more problems with using FCP HD more than anything else. If you'r using a P2 card, you need to use FCP 6. Safe yourself a lot of time an anxiety.

Like I said before... Hopefully, you know this already. Best of luck.
 
Hello,

I am Cole's production partner. We are planning to shoot our documentary feature on DVCPRO HD 720/24pN. I believe that means we will have 40 minutes of footage per 16Gb P2 card.

The 2 portables would just be for offloading the P2 cards while shooting. We have a MacBook Pro with the DuelAdapter for the express card slot, so we'll offload the P2 cards via that onto the portables, and then offload the footage from the portables onto main hard drives/RAID when we get back to the office.

For storage of the footage and then editing in FCP, that is the thing we are trying to determine what solution to go with.

And now for the math...
40 minutes = 16Gb
means
1 hour = 24Gb

A 500Gb drive, minus the unusable portion, would hold ~18 hours. A 1Tb drive would then hold ~36 hours. Since we are shooting a documentary we will have probably hundreds of hours of footage so we will be dealing with terabytes for sure.

In researching RAIDs, I am curious what exactly is the difference between this

http://www.caldigit.com/S2VRDuo.asp (which is $1500 at B&H http://www.bhphotovideo.com/c/product/457856-REG/CalDigit_S2VR2B1500E_1_5TB_S2VR_Duo_External.html)

and this

http://eshop.macsales.com/item/Other World Computing/MESR1.5TB32/ (which is $680)

One difference I am fairly certain about is that the CalDigit comes with the HBA SATA card and as far as I can tell, the OWC RAID does not come with that. I think we would need to get something like this for the HBA, but that only costs a few hundred dollars: https://eshop.macsales.com/item/Sonnet Technology/TSATAIIE4P/

Are there performance-specific features of the CalDigit and other RAIDs like that (such as Sonnet and Firmtek as mentioned by Shane Ross) that make it significantly better to use for FCP editing? Do other RAIDs like the OWC offering and other self-built solutions inherently lack something that the CalDigit includes?

Ultimately we are looking for the best solution with the lowest cost, and we certainly understand that if the higher cost adds significant speed/performance/reliability/convenience then it is worth it and indeed, necessary.

We actually currently have FCP 5.1.4, the one that came in Final Cut Studio, not FCP HD (which I think is also called FCP 4.5. Can't they just pick a naming convention and stick with it?!)

I have read something about FCP 5 not supporting P2 cards, but according to this, P2 cards are supported since 5.1.2.
http://manuals.info.apple.com/en/Final_Cut_Pro_5.0_lbn_z.pdf

What are the anxiety-saving aspects of FCP 6 with regard to P2?

Thank you all very much for your time and help!
 
So here are our questions in relation to the post above:

1. What would be the best use of time and funds, either A. Caldigit S2VRDuo or B. the OWC Mercury Elite Pro. We're also interested in any other systems of comparable specs.

2. What reasons are there to update from FCP 5.1.4 to FCP 6?

Thanks,
Cole.
 
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