FAST STORAGE GE AR .
BIGGER BIT BUCKETS
When everything records files, camerawork starts feeling more like being an IT specialist. Some of the pain, though, can be taken away by choosing the right IT – but a number of those choices aren’t straightforward
WORDS. Phil Rhodes IMAGES. Various
SAMSUNG PORTABLE SSD X5 £94.80-£240.00/$129.99-$239.99
L et’s start with an enlightening comparison. HDCAM-SR was the last in-camera tape format. At full throttle, it delivered 880 megabits per second of data. A 124-minute tape therefore contains around 800 gigabytes of data, at a cost of around £300 each. A one-terabyte flash device, such as Samsung’s 970 EVO Plus, is 30 times faster, holds 25% more, is a third of the price, a fraction of the size and weight, and doesn’t require a five- figure playback device. That’s something that makes camera technicians very happy, faced as they are with a need
to handle the huge data loads of modern sensors and Raw recording. Long-term archive is a vexed question, but the on-set end of acquisition has a lot of options. Perhaps the biggest surprise is that some of those options still include spinning disks – but let’s start with that big, scary Samsung drive, the 970 EVO Plus. HIGH-CAPACITY CIRCUIT BOARDS An M.2 device is really a component, a circuit board – something that might go inside a housing to become a stand-alone
storage device, or be plugged into a workstation to hold the operating system or temporary data for a non-linear editor. Some proprietary storage devices used in cameras have also been based around M.2 drives. There’s only so many ways to package up flash storage, and there are as many pocket-sized devices as there are pockets. The company’s portable SSD X5 (£240 or so) is one such pocket- sized, Thunderbolt-attached device, that will store data at around 2300MB/s per second. That’s the equivalent of shooting Alexa LF Open Gate at over 100fps, and
POCKET POWER The X5 stores data
equal to shooting Alexa LF Open Gate at 100fps
53. SEPTEMBER 2021
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