Pro Moviemaker Autumn 2019

GEAR MINI TESTS

This issue, the round-up of great kit tested by us in includes a Tenba bag, two aluminium tripods, and robust and reliable D-Tap batteries for Sony

WORDS ADAM DUCKWORTH & KINGSLEY SINGLETON

LACIE MOBILE SSD 1TB £223/$235 lacie.com

SPECIFICATIONS Capacity: 1TB Transfer speed: Up to 540MB/s Hard drives: SSD Connection: USB 3.1 Type-C Thunderbolt 3 compatible Connectors: USB-C cable for USB 3.1 Gen 2, USB 3.0 to USB-C cable Software: LaCie Toolkit Drop resistance: 3m/9.8ft Dimension (WxHxD): 78x9x98.4mm/3.1x0.4x3.9in Weight: 0.1kg/0.22lb If it’s speed and reliability on themove you want, look no further. It also comes in a 2TB version to store evenmore data, and a 500GB version if you don’t need the space and are on a budget. The drive is compatible with Apple's TimeMachine for instant backups, and comes preloaded with LaCie Toolkit software, which offers additional features such as mirroring a drive. There’s a three-year warranty and the drive comes with free Seagate data recovery software, which we’ve used in the past and it is one of the best in the business. The drive comes with a free one-month Adobe Creative Cloudmembership, too, with apps like Premiere Pro CC and After Effects. A drive like this is best used for fast work on location due to its speed, size and reliability. Then when you get back to base, download to your larger, desktop-style units with a backup system to ensure peace of mind. AD. PROMOVIEMAKER RATING: 9/10 It’s fast, portable, rugged and 1TB is enough for most filming days Pros: Fast USB-C and Thunderbolt connection, rugged Cons: Still more expensive than conventional HDDs

smartphone. The design features a bevelled edge, but apart from that it’s pretty boxy. It comes in a space grey colour that goes well with AppleMac laptops, whichmany users have. Connectivity is provided by a USB 3.1 Gen 2 Type-C port, which sits next to a small, bright LED that flashes when the drive is in use. The drive comes with a USB-C to USB-C cable ideal for Macs, as this is the same fit as Thunderbolt. It also comes with a USB-C to USB-A cable to fit older Macs or PCs. Of course, you do lose the impressive data transfer speed this way. The drive is said to have amaximum 540MB/s transfer rate. The drive comes formatted in the universal exFAT file systemand we tested the write speeds at 480MB/s and read speeds of 520MB/s, so very close to the quoted performance. That means it’s fast to ingest footage and quick enough to edit 4K files in real time without buffering.

When it comes to portable external hard drives, nothing beats the speed, silence and rugged nature of solid- state drives. While HDDs can be larger in capacity and cheaper, they are also slower. Andmechanical spinning drives can – and will – go wrong. That’s not a huge issue if they’re used as desktop units for large file storage and you have a backup plan in place. But for portable units, they’re not ideal. Theymay have ruggedised cases and beefed-up drives, but they are still prone to failure, don’t like to be dropped and domake a slight noise. LaCie’s newMobile SSDs use the speedier flash-based drives with no moving parts, so there’s nothing to wear out. The new design is smaller and less obvious than those orange- coloured portable hard drives every filmmaker seems to own, as the SSD is much thinner. The drive is smaller and about the same thickness as a

LEFT The space grey of the SSD goes well with Apple Mac laptops

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PRO MOVIEMAKER AUTUMN 2019

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