ADVERTI SEMENT FEATURE | SAMSUNG
THE HOLY GRAIL OF MEDIA Ollie Kenchington, creative director of Korro Films, instantly improved his workflow by using the Samsung Portable SSD X5
“The Samsung Portable SSD X5 gives you a drive that’s lightweight and bus-powered”
Korro Films is a multiservice production company, meaning it works across the genres of work, from social media clips to branded content. It deals with a huge amount of increasing high-resolution work and has lately prioritised a Raw file workflow. The downside of this is the transfer of these files around, and in and out of, the studio. The creative director of Korro Films, Ollie Kenchington was therefore very keen to try out media that could remedy the situation. To try it out, Kenchington used the Samsung Portable SSD X5 to transfer the rushes from a project for one of his clients, which was shot in 120fps 4K Raw. “So we’re talking big, big files – big data rates for the files. I transferred them over to the Samsung Portable SSD X5 to work on them from my laptop at another location.” He explains: “This is a typical kind of workflow for us. We make archive copies of our rushes on to a slower, but bigger, RAID. And then we use these smaller capacity but faster drives as our (what we call) ‘working drives’. And so that’s how we were working with the Samsung portable drive and our workflow.” According to Kenchington, the 2TB version of the drive is the perfect size for Korro Films. “We do shoot Raw an awful lot. You know, if we’re shooting for a day in Raw, that’s going to be probably over a terabyte, and we’d like to normally have enough capacity to work on a couple of days’ rushes at a time. It’s as simple as
IMAGE The Samsung Portable SSD X5 offers blisteringly fast read/write speeds where you don’t want the inconvenience of having to be plugged into the mains. And a bus-powered Thunderbolt 3, 2TB drive is kind of the holy grail for us. There aren’t that many out there. And, actually, the ones that we have used in the past are much more expensive. So I think the price point is really good on this drive, too.” But what were the other benefits of using a portable drive as fast as the Samsung Portable SSD X5? “The other point for me is that we don’t have to transcode the files because the drive is so fast and, you know, the capacities are large,” enthuses Kenchington. “That’s a huge thing for us – we can work from the files natively. The problem with slower drives is that – because the read/write speed isn’t fast enough to keep up with the large data rate files – you do have to transcode them in order to work them. And that’s what we’ve always done in the past.” He continues: “We’ve had 2TB drives for a number of years now, but they’ve always been much slower. And, therefore, you either filled them up with lower data rate files, or you filled them up with the
we either have ten 1TB drives, or we only need to have five 2TB drives – it really just comes down to as basic a thing as that. Our cameras just keep improving, they keep getting much higher quality with larger data rate files, which is great from a post-production point of view. It gives us so many more options, but it does mean that they are big files.” A QUESTION OF SPEED Kenchington was expecting a fast drive, but the Samsung Portable SSD X5 astounded him with its speed. “It’s right up there as the fastest portable drive we’ve ever used; the read speed is 2.8GB/s and the write speed is 2.3GB/s. I mean, that’s super, super quick. That’s faster than even the internal drives in our computers so, you know, the combination of Thunderbolt 3 with those very fast SSD module NVMe drives that Samsung uses is a winning combination. “It really is. It just gives you a superfast drive that’s lightweight and bus-powered, which is a really important feature for us. I’m often working remotely or away,
28 DEF I N I T ION | SEPTEMBER 2020
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