How do you manage your data?
 

Just wondering how everyone is managing their data? What kind of harware are you using in the field to secure your data from the camera? How does that flow all the way into post. What kind of RAID are you working with?

Right now, we are taking the data off the camera HDD into portable HDD (Lacie) of 1TB in Raid 5. The data from HDD is then transferred to a RAID in post.

Bhaskar.


Nobody stuck their hand up so here goes.

Compared to us, you most defnitely have the better goods. What happens here right now is the camera footage is copied over to a USB drive after the shoot and handed to the client.

This has its pitfalls as two USB "courier" drives have come back corrupted from being mounted and copied across to a Leopard Mac. Neither will work any longer on PCs. It might be the same issue which was damaging memory cards.

A better business model would be to factor the cost of the drive into the job and the client then owns the drive and responsibility for preserving the footage which now stays on the camera until successul copy from the courier drive has been confirmed by the client.

I have a client that submitted a 1 TB Mac formatted drive to me and it was unuasable until I discovered a program called "MacDrive 7" One click download and install and now my PC speaks Mac. you might look into it.

As to the OP, we shoot to tape (currently without backup) then capture via FW to an internal SATA 300 drive, this is backed up to an external 1 TB eSata Lacie for onsite backup, and a 1 TB hitachi deckstar drive in a "toaster" (external sata swap.) The deckstar is wrapped in electrostatic bag repacked in the box and sent one county away to our offsite backup facility. The offsite backup is returned when editing is finished and final files and a global disc image (if final output is DVD) are added to the offsite backup and then it is sent away again. No RAID. We capture HDV to internal SATA edit to Internal SATA and backup nightly to eSATA. Captures and final outputs are sent to offsite am still working out sending updates to offsite but too much travel time...I archive tapes until the project is delivered and then they are rotated for reuse.

Copying and Deleting files in the field is becoming quite dangerous for us. So now we are thinking about buying multiple drives for the camera and handing that over to the client when its full. We make a copy of it on a sSATA portable raid system and use that portable eSATA drives at the post. This way the client gets all the data that was shot by his/her camera person and its their responsibilty to keep it safe until the post is finished. We keep all the project files and everything related to that particular film on one portable eSATA raid. More expensive than we would have liked, but better than losing data and being blamed for it.

Recording onto the 48Gb SSD drive card that sits in the laptop's Expresscard slot.

Neat - weighs almost nothing, sits inside the slot so no issues lugging around / securing extra hardware.

Data is then dumped onto editing PC's Raid10 via USB.

Downside: this SSD drive card is not redundant. However so far no issues with data loss.

Also it gets very hot very fast, but the manufacturer says it's normal.

Bhaskar.


We have starting taking the removable drives out of the camera, powering them with 5vDC from a little plug pack and a USB cord into sockets in the front if the removable drives and then copying to a PC. It is safer than using Windows in the camera recorder unit via the touch-screen.

If you copy to a mini USB drive in the field, it is safer to use the mouse control on the side of the camera, rather than the touch-screen for the "Copy" command to avoid accidentally setting off the "Cut" command immediately above it.

Sometimes the touch-screen mapping can get shifted by crew moving a "hot" camera and bumping the touch-screen buttons. If is not restored to its correct position when re-adjusted the "cut" command can be inadvertantly triggered.

The removeable drives will not self-power from the USB connection but need to be separately powered.

Just to clarify: this is, of course, workflow for SI-2L Mini + laptop. Our laptop has Expresscard slot, thus allowing 48Gb solid state drive use without anything extra hanging off the rig :)

I've had no problem powering the removable Dataport drives from the USB port on my Mac Book Pro or iMac - just plug in & start editing.

For those wanting to do back ups/multiple copies of their footage check out Shot Put Pro.

Rohan.


It might be a PC issue or even just my machine. Macs probably got it right. The little Maxtor USB drives will power from the PC but the Dataports would not on my machine.