travel work flow

V

vfranke

Member
I am working on a good work flow for upcoming 2 week trip shooting with the HVX, P2 cards and a laptop. At most I will be dealing with around 300 Gigs.

My current thoughts are:
1) P2 offloaded to PC laptop and back up to external "travel" drive (NTFS) with P2 Genie
2) Because of a total of 300 gigs won't fit on laptop, I plan to burn DL DVD's from laptop for additional back up of each P2 card.
3) View clips on PC to put my doubt to rest with P2 Viewer

When back at edit suite:
4 ) Drag files from External hard drive to "edit" hard drive (Mac OS)
5) Import to FCP and edit
6) Erase "travel drive" and use for next trip

Now My questions:
1) Since I only want to copy from the travel drive- I can keep it NTFS and not FAT32 right? This is the safest way correct?
2) To view clips on my laptop do I need to have a 7200RPM hard drive?
3) Would people recommend a 2nd external hard drive vs burning dl DVD's for a back up
4) Have people had problems burning 8gb files to dvd's?
5) Will I have partition problems with this setup?

I'd also take any advice on a better work flow!

Thanks for any and all advice,

Vince
 
Seems like a pretty good solution. SO you have the 8 gig cards right? I'm very happy with the 4 gig ones for the ability to back them up to the cheap 4 gig DVDs.


personally.. I absolutely love the bus powered seagate ruggedized USB 2.0 drives. They are really small and you can get a 200 gig version now. They don't require power and they are really very travel proof. You'd easily be able to fit a couple of them into a backpack...


I did change out my 5400 speed internal laptop drive for a 7200 speed one. Very happy with that right now.. as I've also captured 1080 footage to the drive for over an hour...


Hope this helps...
 
Yes, I have 2 8gig cards...

Following up on external bus powered drives... I have also heard good things about the G drives. Any comments G drives vs Seagates?

Will there be partitioning problems if I transfer more than 15 times. I caught a brief thread on partition problems, but searched and did not find enough to explain it to me.
thanks
 
I recently did a 3 week travelling job(in a 35' rv) I had all 4gig cards with 2-400 gig 7200rpm drives, our shots were pretty short at each location. After each location we would get back in the rv and i would start downloading. I knew we were gonna have power on the rv so i didnt bring my bus powered drives but not a bad idea to bring it.
Firewire is the way to go with a mac, firewire 800 if you can.
 
figured i would need bus powered drives because I will be shooting wildlife and away from power and the car for the day.

it sounds like people are backing up to second hard drive instead of buring DVD's . What do people recommend?
 
In your #4). Do not drag the files to your edit drive prior to importing into FCP.
When you import into FCP it creates new QT files so you would be doubling up on the amount of space needed on that drive and then you would also have your MXF master files on the same drive as your working QT files, not a good idea. You are better off copying the MXF files to another drive and putting that on a shelf after importing into FCP. Or if you are just using the DVD's for archiving your MXF files then you can just import from your travel drive directly into FCP, though you would need the travel drive to be formatted so the mac could read it.
 
Are you camping with no power for long periods of time?
Lugging a laptop and/or drives around can be problematic and less secure, especially if the hiking is difficult. I would suggest renting a bunch of p2 cards or a couple of p2 Stores to keep it simple.

In any event, I would forget burning to dvd. We use Lacie hards for all our "dumps" in the field and they work fine. We edit right from these drives back in post. LOVE IT. If you need back-up, "dump" twice.

Side note:
I realize you use FCP, but I love using Canopus Edius in the field with P2. The cards slip right into the laptop and the Edius utility sucks them (and all meta-data) right into the timeline. Before erasing the cards (Big Gulp), I can check shots for audio, exposure, and continuity if needed. We've even roughed stuff out right on the spot. Very cool.
 
Sorry to steal the thread, but Jim what sort of PC laptop are you using to dump your cards through?
 
Just got back from 4 months shooting in Argentina, backpacking.

Lugging around DVD's in protective cases increases the bulk by a lot. But it's the most secure, for sure. We use two big-capacity harddrives, mirrored for backup. Hardrives are really squeamish compared to solid-state or disc backup though. We lost a whole 500GB drive on a Bolivian road that could knock your teeth out. But our DVD's were OK.

If you have time and space, back up to DVD.

-andrew
 
The lacie little big disk is a 200gb fw800 raid that's bus powered. It's (2) 7200 rpm laptop drives. In terms of size/capacity/speed it rules but it's relatively expensive.
 
Having a p2 store is an absolute must. Get yourself two firewire or usb enclosures from Comp USA. And two raw 250 gig ide or sata hard drives. When you travel you can store all your p2 data on the external hard drives.. Be mindful, you are going to use one as your master drive and the other as the backup drive. Copy the data to the master drive first, then copy the data from the master drive to the Backup drive. Check some of the footage on the Backup drive, make sure Final Cut /Avid can read it. If your really paranoid like me, check the master drive as well. After everything is kosher, you can erase the p2 store. Don't wait to erase the p2 store, you should erase on the spot. what sucks the most is being at the shoot the next day and asking yourself if you put anything the p2 store that day...

When the two hard drives are full, if you are on the road, you can always stop in a Best Buy, Walmart, etc and buy two more raw drives.

This is what i do.
 
Thanks for all the info!

To answer and follow up:

quote:"Do not drag the files to your edit drive prior to importing into FCP.
When you import into FCP it creates new QT files "

I am purchasing the equipment and so haven't tested... so could i import files into FCP from my "field drive" ( formatted to FAT32 ) and direct the quicktime files to a separate "edit drive" that is only formatted for Mac?

Quote: "what laptop are you using"
I am close to buying a 14"Dell latitude 620. With going to the smaller size I am compromising the firewire port. If I am just dragging files via USB2 off of the laptop to an external ( that has firewire for the import) am i losing some big? I don't plan on editing from the laptop.
- one last question about the laptop... with P2 viewer, i can play back clips after i have dumped them to my laptop ... correct.

- I think I am still leaning towards dumping the backup to a DVD for bomber archiving. Have people had problems with 8gb DVD burns?

BIKEFILM: on a side note- do you have any footage of just the argentina grasslands?

Thanks,

Vince
 
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