Here’s the video I’ve produced for Harley-Davidson’s Swiss Harley Days event. The video was shot over four days in and around the city of Lugano in Switzerland in July 2010.
Click here to find out more about shooting this video and the kit I used.
Coming from a tape based Canon XH-A1 I found the digital workflow of the Sony EX1 to be a wonder with it’s instant clip reviews, no drop-outs, fast ingest and high quality. One problem with shooting on something like SxS, compact flash or SD cards though is that you have to put all of that data somewhere after each shoot. Gone are the days of storing the original tapes in a draw.
After around three years of using a digital workflow I’ve amassed a lot of data, my source clips alone use up around 6TB of hard drive space, add to that working files, transcoded scratch files, renders and all the other bits and bobs that get generated when working on a project and you start to need a lot of space on your computer system. Today I’m still shooting on the EX1, but the problem has only gotten worse with the addition of two DSLR’s, two GoPro’s and the Zoom h4n all filling up cards at silly rates.
Up until now I’ve simply been adding more hard-drive capacity to cope with demand, my mac is maxed out with four 2TB internal hard drives, a 2TB G-Raid scratch disk and an 8TB drobo which is struggling to keep everything backed up using time machine. My mac is once again nearing being full and with 2TB SATA drives still being the largest capacity available I really needed to come up with a way of offloading the older footage and freeing up my system for new files.
So let me talk about some of the options that I’ve looked into and then I’ll go on to describe what I’ve decided to do to tackle this ever growing problem.
Hard Drives
The good thing about hard drives is that they are one of the cheapest ways to store your files, with a 2TB drive costing around £100 that works out at approximately 0.5 pence a GB per drive.
Apparently hard drives have a tendency to seize up if not used for a few years and of course they are quite fragile devices. Drop a hard drive and all the data contained within it could be lost forever, unless of course you can afford to have it recovered by one of those super expensive clever people that can rebuild drives in a secret underground lab somewhere!
I’m a big believer in making sure that anything stored on hard drives is on at least two of them. Even if I’m using a drobo which mirrors the data across multiple drives I still make sure I have a backup on another drive outside the drobo. If a drive fails in the drobo then all is not lost, but what happens if the drobo fails and kills all of it’s drives? Call me paranoid but you can’t be too careful with anything that claims to look after your precious data.
Tape Backup
Tape systems such as LTO drives are designed with backups in mind, they provide a reasonably fast data transfer and the media is cheap. The drives themselves are quite expensive starting from around £1,000 and quickly heading into £2,500 plus for the most up to date systems. The tapes themselves offer one of the cheapest options for storing data, an LTO4 tape can store 800GB of uncompressed data and only costs around £25.
The downside with tape is that when you need to access the files you’ve backed up it can be a royal pain getting them back off of the tapes. I think as a backup system for use in data loss emergencies they do a great job, but for archiving they’re just not the right technology.
Sony Pro Disks
This was the technology I was most excited by when I started looking for an archiving solution, after all Sony must have thought about the workflow issues when they invented SxS and the Pro Disk seems like the answer. Unfortunately though it doesn’t appear to be ideal. Firstly the PDW-U1 drive costs a whopping £2,841. I’m not sure what technological goodness they packed into that little box but it must be extremely clever at that price. The disks themselves are around £45 for 50GB.
Sony Professional disks are used in the XDCAM range of cameras which record directly on to the disks allowing you to simply archive the actual disks at the end of a shoot and charge the media cost on to your client. I really like the thought of working that way but unfortunately if like me you’re shooting on an XDCAM-EX camera though you’d need to copy the footage from your SxS cards over to the pro disks at the end of every shoot.
I’ve been doing a little research into this and apparently it takes around 40 minutes to copy just 17GB of data. That doesn’t make it a practical solution at all. If I come back from a shoot with 60GB of footage on three SxS card it’s going to take three hours or more to transfer everything, and that’s with me being there to swap disks. That’s not going to work!
BD-R & DVD-R
I know a lot of people backup to DVD and Blu-ray disks but personally I don’t trust re-writable DVD’s and BDR’s as far as I could throw them, which thinking about it might be quite far if using the Frisbee technique!. You get my meaning though. Some reports claim that the life span of these re-writable disks is less than three years if kept in ideal conditions and considerably less if not cared for properly. For me that’s just not reliable enough to be storing my footage on so I’m not even considering these at all.
So what’s the answer?
In all honesty I’m not sure there is a good answer at the moment. There really doesn’t seem to be a system that provides reliable long term offline storage with fast data transfer, low cost media and easy access to files. I’ve read that Sony are working on a ‘one time write’ system that uses 128GB optical disks with a long life-span but that’s no use to me until it gets released and there’s no mention of write times yet.
So for now I’m going to keep going the way I have been and use hard drives. Today I’ve blown £1,100 on another drobo, this time the drobo fs model packed with five 2TB drives which is going to become my new backup drive. I’ll use my existing 8TB drobo as a footage storage device. I know I have to archive some data so I’ve also come up with a plan for that.
Of the four 2TB drives I have in my mac, two of them contain footage that’s getting quite old and isn’t likely to be needed very oftem. My plan is to use a pair of 2TB external drives and copy the data from my internal drives onto the external drives. I’ll then pull out the internal drives and store those off site somewhere whilst keeping the external drives here in case I need access to the data at any point.
I know it’s not ideal to store drives without firing them up regularly, but it really does seem like the best option for now. Hopefully Sony or somebody else will address this problem soon, I’m sure I’m not the only person struggling to know what to do with all the data I’m accumulating.
let me know your thoughts and any solutions that work for you.
I’ve just created a new page under the ‘Gear & Reviews’ section of the blog which is dedicated to listing all of the kit I use regularly.
It’s all well and good reviewing kit and reporting how great, or not so great it is but I feel that it’s probably more important to see the gear that I make use of in my day to day shooting. Anything I’ve reviewed is linked to that review, otherwise it’s linked to B&H or another retailer. Some items that I use are discontinued, in which case the links point to an updated version or no link is provided.
On 6th July 2010 HRH The Prince of Wales took the salute at a Royal Review in the Mall, London to celebrate 150 years of the Cadet Forces in the UK. Cadets, volunteers and their massed bands from across the UK marched from Horse Guards Parade down The Mall to Buckingham Palace in a colourful parade, past Clarence House where The Prince took the Salute in honour of the anniversary.
I was hired to shoot the event and make a short (under 3 minute) video featuring the highlights.
The UK isn’t well known for it’s fabulous weather and scorching summers but we’ve been fairly lucky over the last couple of weeks and had some absolutely gorgeous weather. As nice as this heat is when working outside or chilling at the beach though it can also cause a lot of headaches (quite literally) when shooting indoors and trying to work in rising temperatures.
I’ve been shooting some corporate web videos for a company that sells conservatory accessories and window blinds over the last few months so I’ve had to light to match the natural light coming through glass roofs and windows as the fitters went about demonstrating how to install their products. These videos have been shot on a minimum budget so I’ve been using my standard tungsten-halogen light kit and using various density blue gels to match the colour of the natural light.
The most recent shoot took place two days ago in the smallest space I think I’ve had to work in, the room was no more than 10ft x 5 ft and the windows and door had to be closed to enable the fitter to work and also to block external noise. To say it was hot and uncomfortable in there would be a huge understatement! If I’d fired up my Rifa 55 soft box in there I think we’d all have passed out within 20 minutes!
Luckily however I had a Litepanels 1×1 Bi-Color light with me which I had on loan from B&H so I decided to give that a go instead of the rifa. The great thing about LED lights is that they don’t get hot so even though the light did a great job of illuminating the shot it didn’t add to the already uncomfortable heat levels in the room. The other great thing about this light is that you can dial in the colour temperature to match anything from incandescent room lights through to full daylight meaning that a quick tweak of the colour dial perfectly matched the natural sunlight coming through the window without the need to mess around with blue gels and gaffers tape.
The 1×1 is also dim-able so setting the light intensity was also easy, my rifa softbox is either on or off so any adjustments to light levels on the subject are done by either moving the lights or adding some kind of diffusion material. With the 1×1 I just switched it on and dialled it in. If you’re lucky enough to have a few 1×1′s to work with you can also link them up to each other and control them all at the same time from a single unit.
LED lights are a great choice if you’re looking for something you can travel with, they’re a lot less fragile than bulb based lights and often weigh less too which can be a factor when checking in baggage. The light I’ve been using runs on both 120 and 240v mains supply so could be used in the US or Europe. You can also power it using rechargeable V-Mount batteries by adding Litepanels LP1x1-BAPV adapter plate.
The litepanels 1×1 was a great light to work with and didn’t add additional heat to an already uncomfortable situation. As with most LitePanels products though you have a pay a premium for the LED goodness, at a whopping $2,545 the LitePanels 1×1 Bi-Color is quite an investment, especially compared to a more traditional light like the Lowel Rifa 55 soft box which retails for around $440. I’ve also seen cheaper LED lights from other manufacturers appearing on the market but I’ve not been able to compare those to the Litepanels as yet so it’s difficult to say how they stack up in terms of functionality and quality. I can certainly report that the Litepanels 1×1 is a very solid unit and feels like a very professional bit of kit.
In use the 1×1 performed flawlessly, it provided a solid spread of light with no perceived flicker or unwanted changes to brightness or colour. All of the controls feel like they use high quality components, especially the two huge control wheels for brightness and colour which remind me of the kind of volume knobs you’d expect to find on a high end Hi-Fi system.
Not having to mess around with gels and diffusion was fantastic and I loved that after shooting for 4 hours I simply switched the light off and packed it away. That might sound a bit strange, but if you’ve used something like a riffa softbox before you’ll know that you really can’t touch them for at least 20 – 30 minutes after switching them off because they remain blisteringly hot for so long.
I’d love to work with a set of four of these lights and plan on investing in more of them in the future. In the meantime I’m going to be talking to B&H about hanging on to this one for now!
B&H Photo Video sell the LitePanels 1×1 Bi-Color variable LED light for $2,545 and also the whole LitePanels 1×1 range which include floods, spots, multi light kits and a range of accessories including barn doors and egg crates for controlling light spread.
