Pro Moviemaker July-August 2021 - Web

ACADEMY STORAGE

SPEEDY STORAGE

Why using flash-based SSDs instead of memory cards can be a safer andmore affordable solution FLASH POINT!

WORDS ADAM DUCKWORTH

W ith very high bit rates, huge Raw files, and 4K and 8K recording becoming more popular, managing all that data is a huge issue. The traditional route to keeping your camera kit as small as possible is to record everything on internal memory cards – but as file sizes have boomed, so has the price of memory. For example, a pair of 160GB CFexpress Type A cards for a Sony A7S III or A1 mirrorless camera cost £798/$796. Since shooting at the highest resolution can easily fill up 1TB of space, that’s a huge spend on memory cards. Even if you do use memory cards, once you have downloaded them on location, chances

boost in speed over HDDs, making ingesting footage far quicker. You can also edit directly from the drive and play it back in high resolution, without any annoying waiting time while the footage renders. If you use a small, fast SSD with a USB-C connection, you might be able to plug directly into your camera and record straight to that. Cinema cameras (like the Red Komodo) and mirrorless cameras (like the Blackmagic Pocket Cinema 6K Pro and Panasonic S1H) can write directly to a fast SSD. No memory cards needed and no ingesting to a hard drive via computer. That means it’s cheaper, faster, and there are fewer things to go wrong on location.

are you’ll need a fast drive to store them on. Old-school hard disk drives (HDDs) are cheap and have lots of capacity, but often struggle to keep up with huge amounts of data. If time is of the essence, then the speed of footage ingest can be a real issue. Nobody wants to wait around for an hour while cards are copied to a hard drive. The most popular and affordable units are rugged, portable drives, thanks to their small size and speed. Just plug into your laptop and they work – no external power needed. It’s best to use a solid-state drive (SSD), which has no moving parts, meaning it’s less vulnerable to impacts or vibration. There is also a significant

26

PRO MOVIEMAKER

Powered by