Offloading files to multiple macs?

thatwalshguy

thatwalshguy

Member
Hey guys,

I shoot with a small team, and I want to be able to take our original files and transfer them to multiple macs so that we can all edit (long story).

I've been searching around for this for a while, and every solution I come up with either

  • sucks
  • sucks
  • sucks
  • is too slow (<30mbps)
  • takes too long
  • is not designed to handle the size of a day of 3 camera shooting on 5DIIs (we're talking 50-60gigs)

Is anybody else offloading their footage to multiple machines without slowly copying from one HDD to another? Are there any solutions that harness the power of wireless N to do this?

Thanks!
 
What are you doing now?

It would seem fairly easy to have a laptop on set with card readers & external drives to clone and then format each card as it comes out of the camera. The same laptop could make multiple copies of the media files for the edit systems when you're not offloading footage. If you need to transcode footage for editing, consider setting up a computer just for that purpose that would have a pair of quad or hex core CPUs to speed up the task.
 
Basically, I'm trying to take all of my source footage from all my cards and quickly get that footage copied to multiple machines. 3+ machines need to access the same footage at the same time.

It is easy to do that, but until Thunderbolt becomes more widely used, I'm stuck with 30mpbs from USB 2.0. When you start getting up to the gig sizes that we offload after a shoot, it becomes a long, agonizing period of transferring.

I was curious if there was a solution that was much easier than that, like using a network to drop the files to another computer. It might only be 50mpbs, but it's almost double USB 2.0 speed.
 
If you set up a network on gigabit ethernet, it would be faster than USB2.

You could potentially set up a simple server that would be your ingest station & hold the near line archive copies, then you would copy the media to local drives for editing.

Alternatives would be sneakernet via eSATA, USB3 or Firewire 800, all much faster than USB2.
 
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