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BUYERS’ GUIDE
THE CUTTING CREW Choosing the best kit to help take the strain out of editing canmake a big difference to your workflow WORDS ADAM DUCKWORTH
Unless you have the luxury of employing a full-time editor or colourist, then it’s highly likely you spend many hours in front of your computer, cutting your work into a finished film. Even if you do have the budget for someone to assemble your work into a final piece and fine-tune its colours, every filmmaker needs to make rough cuts and learn the ins and outs of editing. Of course, trying to cut together 4K 10-bit footage on a creaky old laptop with a dreadful screen is never professional quality. And it will probably drive you mad with frustration. Although we would all like the mega-budget editing workstations and 100-grand HDR monitors used by the professional post houses, you don’t need to spend anything like that on assembling kit that’s a workable solution for independent production companies. Take a look at some of the best equipment you can buy, at prices as shockingly low as totally free! going to be conducive to producing work of
1. X-RITE i1STUDIO £338/$489 xritephoto.com
There is little point spending hours getting the look of your work just right, if your monitor is not showing accurate colours. It’s essential your monitor is calibrated regularly, so what you see, really is what you will get. And an ideal solution is the X-Rite i1Studio – a professional level, start-to-finish colour management solution. It incorporates today’s broadcast standards for precise monitor and projector calibration, while also delivering accurate colour for cameras, scanners, printers and iOS mobile devices, too. It can even be used on some external camera monitor/recorders to make
sure everything is to spec. It comes with easy instructions, ensuring all screens produce exactly the same colours. It supports NTSC, PAL, SECAM, Rec. 709, Rec. 2020 and DCI-P3 formats.
2. G-TECHNOLOGY G-SPEED SHUTTLE SSD 8TB £4685/$4560 g-technology.com With resolution and bit rates climbing ever higher, there is a huge drain on computing power and capacity. And it’s so frustrating waiting for your computer to render and transcode files or edit footage. It’s wasted time, and time is money. There’s nothing like having a fast and large RAID system to store your footage, and either run applications or manage a video editing library. So, G-Technology has come up trumps with this unique, G-Speed Shuttle, transportable RAID storage system with Thunderbolt 3 connections. It’s a four-bay system that is a compact and transportable design, so you can edit multi-camera footage – from fast frame rates to HDR and even Raw - in real time on location or back in the studio. It’s available in sizes ranging from 8TB at £4685/$4560, to 32TB, which costs a staggering £14,056/$8170. For that, it offers transfer rates up to 2800MB/s, and the largest productions can even daisy chain five additional devices, thanks to the dual Thunderbolt 3 ports. With RAID 0, 1, 5, 10 and 50 built-in, it is the ultimate solution for productions demanding the highest standards of speed and security.
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