Space race | academy
ive filmmakers a new camera with a bigger sensor and there will be no shortage of discussion about dynamic range, rolling shutter and image quality. But every
technological leap comes with a less glamorous consequence: data, and lots of it. Higher resolutions, rapid frame rates and less compressed codecs chew through memory. Once the shoot is over, all those files have to be copied, backed up, edited, shared and eventually archived. And with the price of flash memory rising quickly and some manufacturers struggling to keep up with demand for cards, storage is becoming an increasingly significant part of filmmaking. So are we in a storage crisis? “You can call it a crisis, a shortage, a bubble,” says Melanie Ciotti of storage specialist Studio Network Solutions (SNS). “None of that changes what production teams are up against day to day. There are still stories to tell and deadlines to hit.” Choosing a lower resolution or abandoning Raw because storage costs money rather defeats the purpose of investing in an expensive camera capable of delivering those formats or the huge time and effort of shoots themselves. Instead, the challenge is to build a workflow that makes sensible use of different storage. Why storage is more expensive The same technologies filmmakers rely on are facing competition from an industry with an almost insatiable appetite for hardware – and that’s AI. “The components that power media storage are also powering AI systems and massive data centres,” Ciotti explains. “This drives demand and competition for those limited resources, resulting in price volatility.” It’s a reminder that filmmaking exists within a much larger technology ecosystem. Production companies buying flash storage are competing indirectly for components required by enormous data centres. Ciotti expects supply eventually to respond to demand, although exactly when prices will settle is impossible to predict. More importantly, postponing sensible storage decisions in the hope that hardware suddenly becomes cheaper isn’t much of a strategy. “Deadlines don’t wait for prices to settle and neither should your workflow,” she says. The temptation when prices rise is to shop for the lowest cost per terabyte. With choice of on-camera storage being either flash memory cards or, in many cases, direct to SSD drives, and longer-term solutions being SSDs or spinning hard drive HDDs, the choice is wide and complex. The key difference between storage options isn’t capacity or price, but what the solution lets you do. For an individual filmmaker copying yesterday’s footage from a memory card onto a drive, that
Byte the bullet Having speedy cards and external SSDs is only one part of a pro storage solution
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