SAMSUNG | ADVERTI SEMENT FEATURE
He admits: “Frankly, I thought we’d miss the flight, which was at 6pm, but the speed of the download with the Samsung Portable SSD X5 was astonishing. Chadi was surprised, I was surprised. It felt like the transfer was almost a GB a second. I know it wasn’t, but we ended up backing up the cards in about 15 minutes – about 45 minutes quicker than it normally takes. Thanks to the Samsung portable drive, we made the flight.” Boulter continues: “I use a lot of different types of hard drives, and there is a simple criteria: speed, reliability and robustness. The Samsung Portable SSD X5 flies through, it’s super small – yes, it really does fit in your pocket – it’s robust... I dropped it on this trip at least once and the rubberised coating takes accidents in its stride. The main event, however, is its blistering speed. I’ve never been a great believer in specs – it’s the real-world tests that tell you all. Samsung works as it claims.” He concludes by reflecting on his future projects: “I’m off to Dubai on the next job, 35˚C in the shade, filming cars in the desert. I’ll have my Samsung Portable SSD X5 with me. In fact, it’s already in my bag. Now I just need to get another one!”
“The main event, however, is its blistering speed. The real-world tests tell you all”
managed. On these shoots, managing the data is way down the list – I just needed a reliable, fast and portable hard drive.” CRITICAL TIMING Transferring the footage always happens at the end of the day and, most of the time, takes longer than planned. This was the case with Boulter’s shoot, where he had the added problem of needing to catch a vital flight out to Beirut. He recalls: “My DIT, Chadi, was using a laptop as a transfer device, backing up as we went, but because of the speed we had to shoot at, I was losing the star footballer at 4pm to training, so constant changing of CFast cards and backing them up wasn’t an option. I really couldn’t afford to lose a crew member. We ended up with three 256GB cards pretty much full. We managed to download one, but the remaining two could only be done at the end.”
“We were filming on some residential streets in Jeddah and inside a local football ground in 35˚C. I had immense trust in my filming gear and, having just returned from India where I was filming in 39˚C heat in Delhi, I knew the camera wouldn’t have an issue, but data needs to be backed up and hard drives have never been the most reliable devices,” Boulter says. He continues: “I decided to go with the Samsung Portable SSD X5 drive. I calculated I needed around a terabyte of data, but we ended up using 750GB and the drive had to make a flight – with a person, obviously – in the evening to Beirut. One of the drawbacks of shooting digital (and anyone who has done this has experienced it) is the wait for the data to be backed up. “When shooting 3.2K on a camera, you know you’re going to be dealing with quite a few GBs, and that process can take over an hour or two unless the data pipeline is
MORE INFORMATION: samsung.com/uk/portable-ssd
DECEMBER 20 1 9 | DEF I N I T ION 29
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