I saw a terrific video posted a few days ago and knew that any video/stills people should definitely watch it. The video was the post workflow, storage and backup of a fantastic, professional photographer/filmmaker named Chase Jarvis. With all of my work being tapeless now I know how vital it is that you have a proper storage and with several back ups of your raw footage, compressed and your final edited images. It’s important to do this for your personnel work but particularly important to save it for professional shoots.

Great graphics throughout video that show workflow process

What I have been implementing with my shoots, if time and budget permitting is to offload my work on to my external hard drives with my macbook on set and have a look over the shot to make sure everything is kosher. Once it is, we can move on to new locations or set-ups knowing that we got the shot locked.

Obviously Chase’s set up is really advanced and he has loads of back ups, as he should, because of the amount of money that’s involved in shoots of his size. For those who are on the lower end of the scale I’ll give you some of my recommendations for the more budget friendly types.

GEAR:

Memory Cards: I use SanDisk Extreme Compact Flash 16gb cards with my 7d. Cost- $120. Now these aren’t the cheapest CF cards out there but I wanted to get a high level card for a few different reasons:

1) These cards are rated with a speed of 60MB/s. When reading through Shane Hurlbut’s blog about CF cards he said something along the lines that you should get cards above 45MB/s. The reason being that cards lower than that speed may have greater problems with rolling shutter.

2) Durability. I can attest to SanDisk durability by the fact that one of my CF cards was accidentely left in a shirt pocket of mine, and that shirt  was put through the washing machine and dryer before I realized. After all of that the card still works like a charm! Very impressed with that!

3) I found that 16gb is the best size for my needs. With 16gb you get about 40-45 minutes of footage per card. Now most of my work is narrative films, music videos and commercials so I only film in short intervals. Why I’m against using 32gb cards is that if you’re shooting till you fill up a card that is about 80-90 minutes of footage, which is A LOT of time and money resting on one little card. I get scared just thinking about that. I usually have a DIT offloading as I’m shooting in order to back up my work. I don’t always have a DIT at all my shoots, and that’s why I opted for 16gb for sufficient amount of storage. Otherwise I would have gotten several 8gb cards which shoots about 20-25 minutes, the equivalent of a normal 35mm reel.

NOTE: After using the card and offloading it I like to put a little gaf tap over it showing its full and has been offloaded.

Very durable cards, with no dropped frames

Card Reader: I use the Lexar Professional UDMA Firewire 800 reader. Cost- $75. Love this reader, SO much faster than my old USB reader. As with anything time is money and you want to show your director, producer, client footage ASAP to blow them away with your skills! It also has another firewire 800 connection so you can daisy chain another card reader or run another hard drive through it.

blazing fast reader

Desktop External Hard Drive: People always say how shooting digital is free, I don’t really agree with that completely but external hard drives are getting cheaper by the minute. I prefer Western Digital My Book Studio Edition II for my desktop drives. Cost for 2TB $300ish). It uses a RAID drive system so it backs up twice on different internal drives. It doesn’t hurt that they look pretty sleek next to my iMac ;)

Have used over 5 drives with WD and no problems yet

Mobile Hard Drives: For field use I use Lacie Rugged Hard Drive with 7200rpm. Cost – $160. It’s bus powered and love using it for my mobile edit drive. If your editing with the lacie you want to make sure to get 7200rpm speed so that it’s fast enough to edit HD footage. But I also have the slower Lacie version for a simple field offload backup.Cost – $140. I like the build quality of the lacie mobile drives, they can take some drops and keep on ticking. I know hard drives all come down to what your used to, I haven’t had problems with any of my drives yet and that’s why I’ve stuck with those name brands.

love those rubbery orange grips

Backup your footage properly and you’ll be thanking yourself when that terrible day comes and your main drive crashes and when everyone else is freaking out you’ll be calm and collected and everyone will love you for it.