Workflow with an 8 and a 16

Joe Shaw

Joe Shaw

Well-known member
I have an 8gb card and wanted to know if anyone is mixing shooting 8 and 16 gig cards. Does the imbalance in size cause any problems?

I'm trying to work out if I should get a 16g to go with my 8 or try and get another 1 or 2 8's. Alternatively I could sell the 8 and buy a 16... then wait 'til I can afford another!

Opinions welcome...
 
My recommendation FWIW is the minimum amount of cards is one more than each camera has slots. So if you have 2 HVX's, make sure you have 6 cards of the same capacity. Mixing different capacity cards can work, but if your shooting style is long form ~ish having all cards be the same capacity, allows you to get in a rhythm: 3 16's are fine, 2 16's and an 8 is more of a 3 legged sack race.
 
for my uses i like to just have a pile of 8gig cards. shooting 720pn, i get about 16 minutes of shooting per card and it takes 11 min to transfer a full card to a laptop.

so with an assistant doing the offload process we can shoot all day with just 2 cards.

same logic applies to 16gig or 32gig - or 4gig for that matter.

but to answer your question - no, there is no problem shooting mixed sizes - especially if you have more than 2 for when the bigger card takes longer to transfer than the smaller card takes to fill.
 
wgzn: How are you transferring your cards? If you use pcmcia slot, it shouldn't take more than 4-5 minutes to transfer an 8 gig card.

@the original poster... I shot about 100 gigs of footage on one camera in one day in 1080i/24pa mode. I used 2 8 gig cards and one 16gig card. No problems whatsoever from the mix-matching of card sizes. I had clips that spanned cards and so on, and there were no issues. I used EDIUS broadcast to offload my cards and simultaneously reviewed the footage of each card while it was offloading.

The only thing would be if you needed to continuously roll for long periods of time, you would likely want at least one extra card per camera as suggested. If you are shooting 720p/24pn this won't be much of an issue. But, you would definitely want at least that 3rd card with any of the non-native modes (which would be 1 gig = 1 minute), b/c you won't have enough time to offload a 16 gig card while filling an 8 gigger.

Later,
Jason
 
I get about 21 minutes of 720/24 PN on an 8 gB card, and it takes about 8 minutes to offload.

Regarding mixed card sizes, I think your best choices are:

Buy another 8 ($400 used?)
Sell the 8 and buy two 16s ($1800 - $400 = $1200)

You can certainly use mixed card sizes without a problem though. You'll just be swapping one out for offloading twice as often as the other.

The most relevant issue might be shooting style. If you need to do long or (near) continuous shooting, you're going to need at least three cards as others have pointed out, so you can keep hot swapping and offloading indefinitely. You'll pretty much need to have someone else helping you do that.

If you shoot narrative film-style, two cards is fine, and if you're shooting 720PN, you'll likely go pretty long between card changes. An 8 GB card (at 720PN) has the same recording time as a reel of 35mm film, actually - worked pretty well for filmmalkers for a good while I'd say. 1080 rates (and most others) will only go 8 minutes per 8 GB card, which is still manageable, but a 16 would certainly be preferred there.

I do mainly film-style, so my dual 8 GB setup is quite satisfactory, especially since most of it is at at 720/24 PN.
 
hey jason. yeah im using the pcmcia of my old 17" 1ghz powerbook. it varies between 8 and 11 min depending on how absolutely filled the 8 gig card is
 
hmm.. I guess b/c your laptop is slower then.... A decent general rule for offload times via pcmcia is about half the card size...

So, 8 gigs offloads in around 4... 16 in around 8 and so on....

Later,
Jason
 
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