Fastest way to transfer during live shoot
by Ben Cohen
on
May 12, 2008 at 11:56:01 pm
I'm about to do a 10 hour live concert shoot using five (5) HVX200s shooting 720p. Each camera will have a 16GB & a 32GB card. What equipment should I use to 'dump' footage and how long will it take to dump a full 32 GB card before being able to return it empty to my shooter? Will the 16 GB card fill up before I can return an empty 32 GB card to my shooter?
"If a train is travelling at 50 mph..." Thanks for the help!
Re: Fastest way to transfer during live shoot by Dave Neyman on May 13, 2008 at 3:22:28 am
Ditto to what the others have said. It would help even to have a third card for each camera but it is really a disadvantage when the cards are not the same size.
Re: Fastest way to transfer during live shoot by Ben Cohen on May 13, 2008 at 8:05:15 am
Thanks, this is great help. I will rent additional P2 cards. Can anyone recommend their favorite P2 transfer method/equipment if I'm going to be dumping footage from 5 cameras throughout the day. I will have 2 laptops available on site - maybe more if I'm directed to do so.
Re: Fastest way to transfer during live shoot by Brandon Lima on May 13, 2008 at 8:23:13 am
I have a macbook pro and use an 34express to full size adapter. I can transfer a 32gb card is 16 minutes. For your situation I would say go for the panasonic card reader, you can load 5 cards into it a a time and from what I hear it is the fastest way to get data off the cards.
I always transfer straight to a raid system ( raid 1 ) and then at night copy onto a third hard drive.
Re: Fastest way to transfer during live shoot by Nate Stephens on May 13, 2008 at 12:03:58 pm
Ben, Are your cameras going to be on tripods, locked down to one position..
If so, why not Firewire to laptop ( I use MacBook Pro) capture via FCP to external mirrored esata raid.... I have recorded over 2.5 hours with NO problems in the studio..
You should be able to capture the show on a couple sets of 500gb esata drives per camera. I have a set of (cheap-n-dangerous) Calvary 500sata that were 100 bucks each.. I had them running for a week to see if they would fail, nope...
You need the laptops for P2 capture. You need the Hard drives for P2 off load.. So why not just use the laptops for video recorders...
Re: Fastest way to transfer during live shoot by Ben Cohen on May 13, 2008 at 1:32:43 pm
That is a good idea, Nate. However, only 2 of 5 cameras will be on tripods and those will need to be semi-mobile because the concert is 10+ hours (I want to move the two tripod mounted cameras between sets to add some variety of shot perspective). So, I would have to deal with moving additional equipment on those two cameras. I would rather go the route of having a dedicated laptop/hard drive for each camera, except still use the dump and run method rather than the straight-to-FCP capture.
Still loving these suggestions though, so please, anyone chime in (see above for my upcoming project details) I promise to come back and update on how the shoot went to round out this case study.
Re: Fastest way to transfer during live shoot by Nate Stephens on May 13, 2008 at 2:18:07 pm
Ben, I forgot to mention that I modified an old plastic AV cart for everything. Laptop, mirrored drives (2 sets, firewire and sata), wireless audio reciever, 4 channel audio mixer, 24" LCD monitor-VGA, HD component and composite. I have a camera mono-pod that I have considered mounting to it and I have a large UPS battery with AC/dc converter that I have been meaning to test/time with the system. The UPS battery will power my Sony DXCwsl with DSR1 back and 4" viewfinder for almost 4 hours. Oh, not to forget I have a 32 foot Granite Digital Firewire cable that works great.
It is all very mobile, all on wheels.. A remote pan/tilt head and zoom/focus would be a nice addition as would a cooler of very cold beer.. to sit on of course....
Re: Fastest way to transfer during live shoot by Ben Cohen on May 13, 2008 at 2:59:27 pm
Sounds like a very solid set-up and makes more sense then what I was picturing based on your first post. Unfortunately this concert festival is one week from this Sunday and both budget and time will prevent me from building anything remotely close to that. I'm definitely going to rent some additional P2 cards as well as get as many laptop stations as possible based on Richard and Jeremy's suggestions in the thread so each camera will have 3-4 cards to ensure that my dumping station has plenty of time between cards.
Re: Fastest way to transfer during live shoot by David Hudson on May 13, 2008 at 4:59:35 pm
I would have one person just to run cards and one or two people off loading. Make certain they know the workflow back to front and blindfolded. Always write protect the cards before you put them in a machine. Did I mention P2 Genie?
When we do this every camera is numbered and has an envelope with it's name on it to put shot cards in. These are picked up by the runner who delivers them back in the same envelope.
Don't forget to clearly mark each card.
P2 is not the way to do this cheaply. You need a lot of folks.
Re: Fastest way to transfer during live shoot by Ben Cohen on Jun 17, 2008 at 7:51:21 pm
Well, I promised I'd come back and give a recap of how it went:
We had 5 HVX200s and 1 HPX500. We had 3-4 P2 cards for each camera (a mixture between 4,8,16 & 32 GB). We strategically gave the cameras that were harder to access for our PAs the 32 GB. We had 3 computers with 1TB each for storage. I had 2 people transfer footage nonstop by creating Disc Images from each card. I found this be extremely smart (a suggestion from my Producer). This allows us to keep the footage at it's most pure state as a backup forever, rather than transfering everything to HD. I'm not sure if this saved time, although I think it did purely because the folks doing the transfer didn't have to deal with Final Cut or any software during their workflow.
I had very trustworthy, experienced and focused people doing this transfer for me so I didn't need to worry about it all day.
Thanks for all the advice from Creative Cow, this was my first P2 experience and it worked flawlessly. Now I have a lot of HD footage to edit. I'll come back again in a few months and give a plug to the final product which should be in stores near you soon.
