Workflow While on the Road

[Andrey Sand]

Hello guys, I am planning on shooting a feature in South America in a couple of months and am still having a difficult time wrapping my head around doing everything on the road. The equipment I know I need will be a Macbook Pro with thunderbolt and lots of hard drives. I have realized that if I shoot at 4k with a 3:1 compression rate it will leave me at 25min with the 256GB red drive. I am still not sure if I need to use so little compression, I haven't seen any video displaying the difference in quality using different compression rates.

But while backing everything up in a foreign country will my best option be something like this?

http://www.bhphotovideo.com/c/produ..._Technology_PR602US_12TB_Pegasus_R6_RAID.html


I hope some of the more experienced staff here could lend me a helping hand. I was considering to split my dailies into two groups, with one copy staying by my side while I send the other copy back home for safe keeping, but then I would need huge hard drives at home that would keep everything safe. Hope I am making sense guys!

 

[Johnny Friday]

Andrey,
I am on the road or boat all the time and have a successful way of saving data and wrangling it. Just shot a giant screen doc for imax projection...we did NOT shoot 3:1...first you have to begin with basics...what are you shooting for? 7:1 to 10:1 is fine for most IMO.....then t-bolt is not much help, but bottom line if you are just backing up data....two external 3.5" portable readers via e-stata and a STACK of 3tb Hitachi drives....Then you'll want surge protection and voltage regulator in S.America---the list goes on....feel free to contact me for more info....
Johnny

ps....so if you have time/space and dedicated person...set them up with a tower and 5 bay hot swap like MacGurus with port multiplier: http://www.macgurus.com/store/ecom-prodshow/BurlyPortMultiEncl.html (GET TRAYLESS); then Hitachi 3TB 7200rpm drives; NOW....you actually don't need the 5 bay hot swap if you are not editing etc....so then you can get single (portable) readers--i use on boats or when camping all the time....Cost about $79 each....and e-sata.

piles more info....

 

[Matthew Mann]

Like Johnny said, 3:1 is totally overkill. If you're going to have a theatrical distribution in 4k I MIGHT go 5:1, otherwise the 7 to 10 range should work great. I have an r4 as an online edit drive set at RAID 5 and it's blazingly fast. It might be a bit overkill for a backup drive, but the Thunderbolt is excellent for expediting your file transfer times. The Pegasus' are optimized for an amazing throughput, so I recommend it as an edit drive.

 

[Phil Holland]

Andrey, as others have mentioned 3:1 is pretty damn high. Most features are working at 5:1, 6:1, 7:1, or 8:1. I personally don't shoot lower than 8:1 if I can avoid it, but 10:1 is totally in bounds. This is all with 4k in mind.

 

[Andrey Sand]

Thank's guys, I didn't know 3:1 was total over kill!

Hmmm

Now to go through all the drives you guys posted =)

 

[Randall Brown]

I shot on location for a month in Haiti and needed to back up and edit in the field. I got 12 1TB USB 3.0 portable drives and backed up to two drives at once effectively creating a RAID1, meaning 6TB of raw footage space. We shot to the SSD, and then offloaded via FireWire connected to the MBP and then duped backed up via USB to drives. We hit some snags with our USB 3.0 driver in the express card slot, so ended up using regular USB. Was a bit slow but rock solid, and we only needed power to the laptop and if we dropped power we wouldn't drop the backup because it was all bus powered. We each managed a set of the drives in separate bags/ packs. So if one bag got stolen, crushed, etc. the other person had a copy of the footage. Worked smooth, and was about $1400 for all of the storage. Cheap, and very compact. We each had an additional graid mini 2 drive for editing selects and such and that was the work drive for each of us.mww would transcode selects for editing from the USB drives to the GRAID mini drive in ProRes Proxy, super small easy to edit files. Was a great set-up/ workflow. And I agree with everyone on compression. 5:1 to 8:1 is where we stayed. 12:1 for the extreme slow mo.