Memory Cards - 4, 8mb vs. 2, 16mb

[Lindenberg]

If the price per megabyte was equal would you prefer to use 4 8mb cards or 2 16mb cards? On one hand using more cards requires more card swapping but it also spreads the data across more cards in the event a card failure.

I'm filming a wedding so I need to stock up on cards.

 

[tears2040]

If the price per megabyte was equal would you prefer to use 4 8mb cards or 2 16mb cards? On one hand using more cards requires more card swapping but it also spreads the data across more cards in the event a card failure.

I'm filming a wedding so I need to stock up on cards.

Or it gives more room for one of the cards to mess up. Personally I would use the biggest cards I can afford. These memory cards are very solid and rarely if ever will fail. There are no moving parts like Hard drives and as long as you take care of them and format them ( in your camera) you should be fine.


Another thing to do is have a laptop with you and as soon as a card fills up just dump it right away to your computer. This is my opinion and not necessarily fact.

 

[swyzlstyx]

Get a 32gb Sandisk Ultra Class 4....it's enough to hold 2-3 weddings.

I understand the old photographer arguement about using multiple cards to spread the images out, so you don't have a total loss in case of a malfunction. But I don't buy it.

It doesn't matter how thin you spread it, all the extra cards in the world won't magically bring back the footage if you have a total card failure. If it's gone, it's gone. The only real way to guarantee the footage is two have a second camera person...IF the customer pays you for it.

However, I HAVE seen wedding photographers crawling on their hands and knees on the floor LOOKING for cards they had LOST. I HAVE got requests from brides to make prints from the video because their photographers accidentally formatted over one of the data cards after swapping at a wedding.

I'm one that tends to believe that most card "failures" are really user error...but nobody likes to admit that...especially to clients. And by keeping that card safely in the camera until you get it home and capture it immediately, you reduce the risk of losing it, breaking it, or accidentally formatting/deleting it.

I average about 1 wedding per weekend, and keep 3 x 32gb cards in rotation with my GH1. That way I can dowload/edit as soon as I get home, and not have to format it for 3 weeks...which gives me plenty of time to keep it as backup in case my computer crashes.

Good luck!

 

[j1clark@ucsd.edu]

It doesn't matter how thin you spread it, all the extra cards in the world won't magically bring back the footage if you have a total card failure. If it's gone, it's gone. The only real way to guarantee the footage is two have a second camera person...IF the customer pays you for it.

Good luck!

The belief is that if the likelihood of failure is equal across multiple cards, then, a catestrophic failure in one, will not affect the rest...

When The Wife and I finallyl went digital, we bough, at great expense at the time more cards than we estimated necessary, so we would never during a ceremony have to 'reformat' a card, and potentially lose data. Because of the 'cheapness' of shooting digitally we gradually moved up to about 10 4GB cards per wedding. We also got a portable storage device and even though we didn't reuse the cards, we started up loading to have a second backup during the wedding.

In the 20 or so years of shooting weddings with film until full digital swich over, we only lost a portion of one wedding, when a Hasselblad back had a light leak... never used that back again even after it was repaired... after the change over, we never lost a digital image set. The closest that we (corporate we...) came was when The Wife had a wedding in Australia, and there was some weird screwup on a transfer from a card reader to the Mac she was using. The images all came across, but 'something' happened, and the card was 'unreadable' until I used one of those recovery programs to fix things up.

One of the problems with most 'disk' devices these days, is the inability to push a button and make the device 'read only'. In the old days one could do that with diskdrives in general. On modern things like the SD cards, there is a flip switch, but not on Compact Flash devices...

So, I suspect that someone pulled the device out of the reader when the Mac hadn't quite finished 'writing' something to the device... we don't recall who that someone may have been...

As for 'formatting' at weddings, part of the prep was before leaving the house, formatting all the devices, so there would never be an occasion to need to format at the event... Sort of like having all the batteries you'll ever need all charged up... or as many rolls to cover any thing, and any overtime... as a note, while we had different hours, we usually ended up only selling 'full day' coverage... which for us, and we were told we were 'unusual'... could b 12 to 18 hours...