Re: Test of the HPX 2700 now online

[Ernie Santella] "Maybe I don't understand completely how much time is involved."

There is now doubt that time has shifted in to the hands of a DP. Transferring cards is not an instantaneous process.

As far as how it's done, there's a myriad of ways. Mostly what I do (as I am the guy that transfers the cards on the shoot and then handles post) is transfer the cards using a verity of software. That's all well and good, but not really good for one man crews or crews that don't have a data wrangler.

So, if we do send one guy out to shoot and the shoot spans more than one card, you can actually put the camera in to USB host mode and the camera will format the drive to a fat32 partition, then start dumping off the cards and keeping the card structure. You can do this with a bus powered drive (i.e. laptop drive) with no extra power involved. The drives are small, light and relatively cheap. Much cheaper and less bulkier than 4 boxes of tape that you have to worry about. Download the HPX2000 manual and look up USB host mode. It tells you all about it and the different ways in can be done.

[Ernie Santella] "You have to change cards during the file x-fer (5-6 cards?) "

Not if you are going from the camera. The bigger body cameras have 5 card slots and it will handle it. If you shoot more than 5 cards in a day, you will have to switch cards, yes.


[Ernie Santella] "And how long would it take to duplicate all these files for a safety copy? (That can be done unsupervised correct?) "

Well, you can get tricky and use a bus powered raid1 drive array and have an automatic backup as it's copying. Yes, unsupervised. You just have to make sure that it gets all the way through.


[Ernie Santella] "And how do you archive all your raw footage? "

Right now we use redundant SATA drives. They are cheap, hold a LOT of info and are easily searchable. This becomes an archive and this is where metadata comes in to play. For those saying that you have 1000s of tapes of archival material that you access regularly, you have no idea how much easier this will be in a tapeless format. It is all searchable and as long as it's on a drive, it's almost always online. No logging, no capturing, no hunting for timecode.

We have been looking into a more permanent tape backup system for deep archive, but haven't pulled the trigger yet. We will be looking at a Quantum LTO system once we can get our hands on a demo.

Jeremy