Barry_Green
Moderator
Latest workflow innovation to report. Tonight we shot a commercial that required lots of interviews/testimonials and, consequently lots of P2 offloads. (well, not LOTS, only about five.)
We delivered the footage to the client on a hard disk, as always.
My plan was to copy the cards twice; once to the external hard disk for the client's master, and also onto the laptop's internal hard disk for safety, just in case. Redundancy is good, right? Even if it takes twice as long.
Well, I'd copy it to the external, and wait four minutes until it was done. Then I'd copy it to the internal drive, waiting that four minutes. By then it was almost time to swap out the next card. Which is all fine and dandy, but it'd be nice if there was a little more time available, a little more breathing room...
... and I got to thinking... y'know, that card is supposed to have an 80 megabyte per second data transfer rate. The hard disk is the bottleneck; it's only about 30 megabytes per second... which means there's a lot of "read" capability going unused... and there's no read/write head that needs to get moved around, because it's solid-state storage, so there's no wasted time in seek overhead...
... so I tried copying the next card to the external hard disk, and while it was copying I opened up a second window and dragged the card's contents onto the internal hard disk, just to see what type of speed hit it'd take. And the answer is: hardly any! Copying the card to both the internal and the external drives at the same time resulted in total transfer rates about identical to just copying it to the external drive alone. If it was any slower, it was barely slower!
I thought that was pretty cool. Don't know why I hadn't tried it before. This means you should probably be able to copy to two external hard disks simultaneously as well -- one on firewire, one on USB2 for example, so there's no bus speed conflicts.
Just thought I'd throw that out there, for those doing P2 offloads on a laptop -- you can get a second/redundant copy done in almost the same amount of time as it would otherwise take to just offload the card in the first place!
We delivered the footage to the client on a hard disk, as always.
My plan was to copy the cards twice; once to the external hard disk for the client's master, and also onto the laptop's internal hard disk for safety, just in case. Redundancy is good, right? Even if it takes twice as long.
Well, I'd copy it to the external, and wait four minutes until it was done. Then I'd copy it to the internal drive, waiting that four minutes. By then it was almost time to swap out the next card. Which is all fine and dandy, but it'd be nice if there was a little more time available, a little more breathing room...
... and I got to thinking... y'know, that card is supposed to have an 80 megabyte per second data transfer rate. The hard disk is the bottleneck; it's only about 30 megabytes per second... which means there's a lot of "read" capability going unused... and there's no read/write head that needs to get moved around, because it's solid-state storage, so there's no wasted time in seek overhead...
... so I tried copying the next card to the external hard disk, and while it was copying I opened up a second window and dragged the card's contents onto the internal hard disk, just to see what type of speed hit it'd take. And the answer is: hardly any! Copying the card to both the internal and the external drives at the same time resulted in total transfer rates about identical to just copying it to the external drive alone. If it was any slower, it was barely slower!
I thought that was pretty cool. Don't know why I hadn't tried it before. This means you should probably be able to copy to two external hard disks simultaneously as well -- one on firewire, one on USB2 for example, so there's no bus speed conflicts.
Just thought I'd throw that out there, for those doing P2 offloads on a laptop -- you can get a second/redundant copy done in almost the same amount of time as it would otherwise take to just offload the card in the first place!
