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Dear Mr Alister, let me thank you for the invaluable resource of your blog. I’m so sad I couldn’t abuse of your kindness even more by attending the Dublin workshop and ask dumb questions. I live in Brussels.
Please allow me just two questions.
1. I’m due to record long shooting sessions in faraway humid places such as Democratic Republic of Congo. I know that the best solution would be to buy 6 hours worth of SxS cards and a Express34 to Thunderbolt adapter but that’s more than 2000 € and I can’t afford it right now. A 800 € solution would be to buy only two 32 Gb SxS and stop shooting every 2 hours for copying the data on my MacBook (this would take 15 minutes, is that correct ?). A 250 € solution would be to buy two 64 Gb SDHC cards (Sony or Sonnet adapter ?) which I could copy using my MacBook’s SD slot (no idea how long it would take). I’m wondering which scenario is the more risky.
2. I’m wondering if there is a notable difference between 4.2.0 and 4.2.2 when shooting in low light conditions.
Again congratulations for your great work
You are in a difficult situation.
You will be shooting in a remote hostile environment and I assume a card failure or loss of data would be a major issue as the costs involved with trying to go back to re-shoot would be astronomical. So. this is the very type of scenario where you really should be using SxS and that would be my recommendation. Have you considered renting cards for the shoot?
You can off load a 32GB SxS card over thunderbolt in about 6 – 10 mins IF you also have an eSATA drive attached or are copying to the internal drive. If your backing up to USB or firewire then the transfer speed will slow down a lot. Off loading from SD cards is much slower than SxS. It will take about 16 to 25 mins to off load a single full 32GB SD card. If I had no choice other than to shoot on SD cards in this scenario I would by a bunch of 16Gb cards and use these. One of the major differences between SxS and SD is that with an SxS card any data corruption (which is incredibly rare anyway) should result in the loss of no more than 4 seconds of footage. With an SD card any corruption often results in the loss of everything on the card. By using smaller SD cards you spread your risk, if something goes wrong you’ll only loose 16GB (22mins) as opposed to almost 4 hours of loss with a corrupt 64GB card. 16GB SD cards are so cheap now it may even be possible to buy enough that you don’t need to back them up further minimising risk.
Thank you Mr Alistair. BTW I also looked for XQD cards and found that for the time being they are only marginally cheaper than SxS and that I would need 3 adapters instead of one, which makes that solution cheaper only if I buy more than 96 Gb worth of cards, with the added danger inherent to adapters. I’ll look for the renting solution.
BTW Do you have something to say about the quality difference between 4.2.0 and 4.2.2 in low light conditions ?
Thank you very much