Solid state media management on the road

[zaarc]

So I'm trying to figure out a good file management workflow while on the road for a shoot. We are doing a documentary that will include some run and gun, some sit down interviews, and coverage of an event with a stage and an audience. The shoot will be over ten days in three different cities. I will be shooting with a HMC150. Here is my plan of action, based on what makes sense to me from what I have read so far, even though this is my first time working with solid state media:

I'm planning to have 6 16GB class 10 cards. {trying to decide between Transcend and Patriot, or three of each - any votes?} I doubt we will go through all six cards in any single day. I'd like to number the cards somehow so I can identify them. Is it ok to write on them? From there what I would do is set up directories on a Netbook and two compact USB2.0 HDDs, labeled as Day One, Day Two, Day Three, etc, and within each of those have a subdirectory labeled Card One, Card Two, etc. Each day I would load each card's PRIVATE directory into the corresponding location.

I would also like to have set up on the netbook individual Excel files with catalog info that i can type in at the time, or transcribe later from paper copies I would have with me as I shoot, each page corresponding to a card. The Excel file could then be added to each directory along with its respective PRIVATE folder.

I'm not sure how long these transfers would take. Assuming in the worst case that I actually filled all the cards on a given day, about 96 gigs, (which is ten hours of video, and therefore not very likely, but still) I thought I would put it on the netbook first and then transfer it to the two drives. The netbook drive isnt big enough to hold more than that, so it would have to be wiped before transferring the next day's work. It just seems somehow more secure to dump it there first rather than transferring directly from the cards to the drives. I could put all the cards into the card directories on the netbook once, and then copy the DAY folder to the drives. Any input from the real world on how long this would take if I waited til I got back to my room at night?

Am I being unrealistic? Am I overthinking this? Am I missing anything?

Also looking for recommendations on portable HDDs. I know the small ones wont be especially fast, but I'm mostly interested in size and reliability.

Thanks for any advice I can get. From what I have seen around here so far, you guys are awesome. :thumbsup:

 

[Paul Hudson]

A recommendation for portable hardrives would be Lacie Rugged and always make redundant copies of everything.

 

[Allen Ellis]

Sounds great

Sounds great

Hi,

I did a 2-week, 15-minute documentary with 25 hours of source footage, mixing between interviews and run & gun. I did everything by myself.

I used 4 class 6 16GB cards. Three were Patriot, one was Transcend. I also brought the 8GB Panasonic Gold I got with my rebate last year, which I didn't end up needing.

To handle the files, I dumped all the cards at the end of each day (or the next morning). I dumped them onto my laptop, a Dell XPS M1530 using its integrated SD slot, and this took I believe 15-30 minutes per card. So allow time for that.

I don't trust Window's "move" command in case something happens in the middle, like I need to shut down and run somewhere, so instead I copy the files from the card to an external drive, and after that finishes I copy again from the external drive to my backup external drive. I confirmed that everything copied by right-clicking the PRIVATE folder and comparing the byte count between them.

It worked... it was a bit of a pain and I'm sure there's software to automatically copy to two destinations and verfiy, but I couldn't find any easily that I wanted to buy.

My two hard drives were Western Digital 500GB passports that I got at Costco. I think they're selling Seagate drives now, you can check NewEgg, too.

Now your specifc questions:

1) The thing is, Patriot isn't used nearly as much as Transencds, so we don't have a good amount of data. I bought Patrioits because one user here showed benchmarks that it was the fastest of many cards. However, two of the three Patrioits have now split their plastic on one side. They still work but I'm nervous it'll get worse so I've retired them both.

I haven't heard any reports of Patrioits failing with Check Card errors. I've heard a few reports of Transends doing that. That's probably because of the volume - far more people here have used Transcends. There was a bad batch from Taiwan a while ago.

1b) I'm not sure if you can write on the cards. I wrote on all of mine with a sharpie, giving each a number. It hasn't caused me any problems but I'm not a super heavy user of my camera. (< 10 hours/month)

1c) Your plan for file directories sounds great.

2) Excel spreadsheet - sounds like a nice plan. If you have the chance, take an hour and do a test shoot and practice each step of this workflow. If your days were like mine you'll have practically no time to catalog as you go. I waited until I got home to log footage and I was fine, but if you can do it as you go, more power to you.

3) I don't see any reason to put the files on the netbook drive first. The bottleneck in transfer speeds is your card reader/card, limited in all practical purposes to 10-15 MBps. Your USB drives should go around 20-35 MBps**. So I'd copy to your primary external drive, and then from there to your second drive. This will be the fastest. Don't forgot to verify that the folder sizes are the same.

3a) There isn't really much reason the netbook drive would be more secure. It's protected physically a tiny bit better but as long as you don't drop everything off a table there shouldn't be a saftey difference. Besides, just wait until both drives have a copy before you re-format the card and you'll have two copies at every point.

Am I being unrealistic? Am I overthinking this? Am I missing anything?

Nope nope . You sound just like me before my shoot. Everything you've said makes a lot of sense, and you seem to be pretty good at improvising as you go. Like I said, practice the whole workflow if you like. But it seems you've put a lot of thought into this and I'm guessing you'll be just fine.

And don't forget to have fun out there, too

** I used MBps, captial, which stands for MegaBytes per second. 1,000 of these is a GB. Another common unit used for transfer speeds is MegaBits per second, written in lower-case (Mbps). The difference is that bytes are bigger. It takes eight bits to make one byte. Windows and OSX show transfer speeds in MBps. Product specifications tend to advertise transfer speeds in Mbps. So be careful not to confuse them if you're trying to calculate offload times.