EX3 work flow at a gig?

[Simon Denny]

Before I purchase the EX3 I have been looking at my potential work flow from recording through to capture both a live gig and dumping back at home.
My question to others is,
When your at a gig and both cards are full (considering you don’t have more than two) what are you using to dump into. Are you using a PC laptop or a Mac laptop, or maybe a hard drive.
Using tapes for so long they are just easy but I think this work flow will stump me a bit.
I do a lot of traveling and at times I’m recording for up to 6hrs of tape a day. How should I approach my work flow with the EX3.

Simon

[Craig Seeman]

Dumping to MacBookPro and I don't wait until both cards are full. First card is full and it gets dumped checked cleaned then goes back into camera before 2nd card is full.

[Adam Reuter]

Look around this forum for workflow. The EX1 are the same.

My short answer is I just bought a PC laptop to offload during gigs where the cards may be filled up. That's about all I will use that laptop for...offloading the EX1 at on-site at jobs. I either offload the cards myself or preferably have an assistant do it. I also have a USB-powered hard drive that attaches to the laptop.

After the external drive and the laptop drive both have copies of the video folders then and only then are the SxS card(s) formatted.

If I need to provide footage to a client at the end of the shoot I either ask them to bring an external hard drive along or if I forget to ask or they don't have one I burn DVD-Rs as expendables. $.35/DVD for good discs (I refuse to buy cheap media) ain't bad.

Make sure to buy at least two of the big batteries for the EX-3. The one that came with my EX1 (I don't know about the EX3's supplied battery) doesn't last very long. But the two big ones and the small one are good enough for an entire day's worth of shooting.

Tapeless takes a little getting used to but it's a lot like going from film to digital still cameras. Video takes a little more work/cost to do BUT it saves time and money in the long run. I LOVE not having to log/capture and risk having dropouts on MiniDV tape. Producers love the instant video playback during the shoot and editors like only having to drag and drop files that are already separated into clips!

Okay...maybe that wasn't a short answer after all. But yes, laptops with ExpressCard slots (at least for now) are the way to go.

[Craig Seeman]

Adam you left out another good feature of tapeless. You can actually shoot 6 hours straight and without a tape change, not miss a single thing. I often shoot long speeches and/or performances and never having to worry about how fast I can do a tape change is a dream.

[Simon Denny]

Thanks Guys,

I will need to look at this work flow if I do indeed go down the EX3 path.

Simon

[Dave Morrison]

Adam, what format is the video in when you give your client a copy at the end of the shoot? Are you giving them BPAV folders or are you saving it to something else?

[Adam Reuter]

Originally Posted by Dave Morrison

Adam, what format is the video in when you give your client a copy at the end of the shoot? Are you giving them BPAV folders or are you saving it to something else?

When offloading footage to the laptop and then from the laptop to an external drive (which is what the clients' format would ideally be, DVD burning on site stinks) I use Clip Browser to copy files to different folders. So all clips that were shot on card A will go into a folder named "Card A - 01" or whatever the client wants. For a movie it's best to base it off scene numbers and letters. For a documentary it's whatever the footage is being shot (John Smith Interview 2008-09-09 or Concert Cam A 2008-07-04).

Clip Browser makes the BPAV folder structure so I don't have to worry about it.


Indeed I did forget about the non-stop shooting ability of tapeless, Craig! For anyone who has done events long enough you know how frustrating it can be to stop, eject, load and then hit record again. If you're quick it takes about 20 seconds in total. With tapeless it's non stop (assuming wall power is used) and when you press the record button it's instantaneous...no waiting for the tape to get speed.