Of load station hardware options

[Kevin_J]

I've got a show coming up which is going to present some interesting scenarios at me for offloading. As of now there will be SxS, CF, and SD flying in daily, estimated to be around 500gb per day. Ideally I'd like to be moving multiple cards at once using shotput with checksum.

For portability I am looking at using my Tbolt Macbook pro. So I've got 2x USB3, 1 FW800, 1 Tbolt.

I have a couple scenarios:

MBP Option 1
-Inputs: USB3 SxS Reader, USB3 CF/SD Reader, Internal SD Reader
-Outputs: ESATA Via Sonnet Echo/Cal Digit Esata card

This seems straightforward, however I am limited in the amount of cards I can offload at once. Also unsure if the two USB3 ports on the MBP share the same header.

MBP Option 2
-Inputs: Sonnet Qio via T-Bolt
-Output: ESATA via QioOn this setup, would the Qio choke heavily when trying to run multiple offloads through it and back to the ESATA? This setup would also be an issue as I couldn't run an external monitor- however if it is significantly more efficient I can live with that.

The third option is to potentially build a PC tower, some flavor of i7 with a bunch of 3.0 and ESATA ports using multiple readers or maybe a PCIe Qio.

Any thoughts would be appreciated, thanks gang.

 

[Jarek Zabczynski]

Honestly, with multiple AND mixed media flying at you at once I would also consider a TWO machine solution. Just was in a similar situation where we had an Epic, two 5Ds and like seven gopros shooting all at once. The stuff that hung us up the most was honestly the 5Ds. Two machines would also help if you need to be transcoding while on site. I'd go with the Qios, nice and neat.

 

[Kevin_J]

I looked at two systems, however that isn't in the budget.

So there is no problem have the qio as the card reader (source) and the host for the esata raid (destination)?

 

[Jarek Zabczynski]

I don't know the technical side of how the Qio works so I can't say. I would give it a shot and if there seems to be a bottleneck, I'd throw the Lacie TB esata dock into the mix.

 

[Björn Benckert]

I would borrow any kind of laptop to run a second station. It can not be much of a budget needed for doing so. One machine with a lot of reads and writes to different media and different ports... that's like asking for trouble. I would rather keep one laptop per camera and get the material quckly offloaded and also checked. Shotput is good but it does not mean anything if you do not look trough your material. As you could basically transfer black frames or such, or things damaged allready on the ssd cards. And if you transfer trough all ports on a Macbook it will risk having errors while tanscoding and you have limited time to hit play... or scrub. As the machine will be occupied of moving so much data.

 

[Kevin_J]

Jarek- unfortunately we just can't buy a qio and hope it works. The Lacie Tbolt/Esata has very limited compatibility for gear that is not Lacie.

Bjorn- I certainly agree that it would be advantageous to have multiple offload stations going, however it's just not currently budgeted and this isn't a "borrow a machine" kind of job. I've done many DIT jobs and am familiar with the pitfalls of this situation, but I must make do with the tools at hand.

I'm going to go with the Sonnet Echo/Esata Card scenario and will report back on the results.

 

[Jason Muler]

Make sure the 5Ds are shooting to fast cards. Even if your running fast readers, slow media will be your downfall.

While your at it, ask for 64GB SxS cards. They are faster than the 32s.

 

[Jason Muler]

Look into some TB expansion and the CalDigit 3.0 pci card