32Gb or 16Gb SDHC

[Paul Mailath]

With the price for 32Gb cards coming down (B&H has a great deal on Sandisk at the moment) I'm wondering about just using 1 card for a wedding.

I currently have separate cards for each section, 8Gb for prep, 16Gb for ceremony, 16 for reception and a spare. There is usually space on each (I'll swap out before the start of the speeches etc) but wouldn't it be nice to just keep shooting. (except for the battery life!)

I have this nagging doubt about fails, right now if a card failed it would only be part of the day (I use multiple cameras) but with the big cards I've lost a shitload of footage.

what are your thoughts? - is big better?

[David Schmaus]

My thinking is this. I can not afford to loose ANY of the day. Which means I need to backup as I go. Here is what I do.

I have 32GB CF cards. I like the big cards for long ceremonies. I bought a Nexto portable harddrive/CF reader. I keep it with me in my camera bag. It will backup and verify. Then I can continue to record on the same card until its full. When I go to backup the same card it knows it and appends what is already there. When that card is full I put it in a Think Tank CF holder upside down that is clipped to my belt and stays in my pocket.

I backup after each prep, after ceremony, after video shoot, twice during reception.

Hope that helps!

David

[Abraham Texidor Sr.]

I go no bigger than 16Gb and keep shooting on multiple cards. I rather loose 16Gb of my work and not 32Gb. I shoot on the Sony NX5U and just ordered the Sony HXR-FMU128 Flash Memory Unit as a back up unit.

[Jeff Harper]

I use 32GB cards, and it's really nice. All I have to change are batteries. I have to admit it is terrifying to think about losing the data from a card.

But with multiple cameras, it is awfully convenient. For the wedding receptiions I run one camera continuously as back up with LCD turned off and it just goes and goes.

[Travis Cossel]

We use 32GB cards for each camera for each section of the day (pre-ceremony, ceremony, reception). Keep in mind that in almost any case you can recover files from a card. I even know of someone who lost a card out in their yard and it sat out there all winter and they happened to find it in the spring and they still got the files off of it. The most important thing is to have a system in place so that you won't LOSE a card. That is unrecoverable. d;-)

[Jeff Harper]

Travis, that is VERY good information, thanks for sharing it. I feel a lot better knowing files are recoverable in most cases. I'll worry about how it's done when I get to that bridge.

[Buba Kastorski]

I'm using 32Gb, cards for all cameras, express cards, CF and SDHCs, wanted to switch to 64s, but decided to wait till next year and switch to 128 SSDs

[Travis Cossel]

No problem, Jeff. Just keep in mind 2 points. First, if you DO have an issue with a card or mistakenly format it or whatever ... don't do anything else to it. Get it in the hands of a professional recover team (like DriveSavers). Second, use a professional recovery service to recover the data. There is software out that you can purchase for recovery but my understanding is that sometimes it can do more harm than good (not all the time, but sometimes). If it was just some random video I shot or something I could re-do I might go that route. But for a card with wedding footage on it I would go with a professional service. Not cheap but you know the saying.

[Jeff Harper]

I will keep your advice in mind Travis. I do have some decent software I bought from Seagate, and it's pretty darned good stuff from a consumer point of view, but you're right, would be best to leave it alone and send it off.

[John Wiley]

Regardless of what size cards you shoot, it is always important to have plenty of spares. If one card starts playing up, gives me any kind of error or buffer warnings or anything, I want to be able to swap it out for a fresh one and not worry whether or not I'm gonna get that error again or if there is something wrong with the card I'm shooting to.

I prefer 16gb & 8gb cards, because that way I don't pull all my eggs in one basket. I also like changing cards after every section, that way when I import the footage later on, I know exactly where everything is without having to sort through it all.

[Nigel Barker]

32GB cards suit us. This size is the sweet spot for value per GB at present & means we usually end up with at most three cards per camera & generally just a couple. I appreciate the argument for not putting all your eggs in one basket but as we have thus far never had a card go bad (we only use Sandisk Extreme or Transcend 400X) then with multiple cameras I think that it's a risk worth taking compared to the logistical problems of having four times the number of 8GB cards that need to be safeguarded.

[Danny O'Neill]

Im with John. We change after each section and only ever get to around 8-12GB on any one card. But we do use just 32GB cards incase what were filming goes on and on and on. We could get away with just a few higher capacity cards for the longer parts of the day but didnt want the hassel of finding the right card for the right part of the day.

We have yet to loose data but we did have one card which after capturing, I put it back in to check the data was all there and the card was corrupt.

We use only branded cards but brand or no brand. Failures happen and the one time it does, you will wish it didnt have an entire day on it.

I dont expect to ever have a failure but im prepared for the day it does happen. The same reason we always backup all our weddings to 3 places. But it depends on your budget. You can go really extreme in your data management but its all down to what you can afford to spend vs what you can afford to loose.

[Corey Graham]

I like using 8 and 16GB cards for different parts of the day, for the sake of organization. When I get back to the editing bay and begin to transfer and edit, I quickly know which clips go where. Otherwise, I'm taking time to go through clips to figure out where the prep ended and the ceremony starts, etc. It's just easier to know that one card is prep and nothing else.

[Travis Cossel]

Originally Posted by Nigel Barker

I appreciate the argument for not putting all your eggs in one basket but as we have thus far never had a card go bad (we only use Sandisk Extreme or Transcend 400X) then with multiple cameras I think that it's a risk worth taking compared to the logistical problems of having four times the number of 8GB cards that need to be safeguarded.

That was exactly our thinking. A corrupted can can be recovered 99.9% of the time. A lost card cannot. So it made sense to us to have fewer cards in the mix and thus a lower chance of having one disappear.

[Anthony McErlean]

I mostly use 16GB cards and take more than enough with me to my wedding.
When I get home I would copy the clips with Clip Browser to a hard drive in a Welland 3.5 Sata Mobile Rack.
I would call this my External Hard drive.
Once all my cards are copied I would then use a Copy and Paste from the external HD to a fixed internal Hard drive in my PC.
Once thats finished I then would remove the Hard drive from the Welland Mobile Rack and keep this as my external drive.

I then use clip browser to drag my clips from the internal HD to my Edius bin.

I would also make another backup of my cards to a second external hard drive in the Welland Mobile Rack giving me a total of 3 copies of my cards.

How may backup copies would you make of your cards before using them again?