Sep 10, 2010

HVX200 Workflow with Latest Barrick Project

I've been filming the last three days in downtown Salt Lake City. Its a new project with Barrick Gold. They've been long days, 12-15 hours, depending on what studio work is needed to process footage and dailies. We're shooting two cameras, sometimes at the same time as a camera A and B and other times in different locations and different stuff.

I'll give you a quick workflow summary:
Cam A timecode at 00:00:00;00 and Cam B at 10:00:00;00.
A whole bunch of P2 cards.
2 Lacie 1TB rugged drives.
One PowerBook with PCI slot.
Power strip, I like the squid (as I call it).
8 batteries and 2 chargers.
2 HVX200s.
Two tripods with fluidhead.
XLR cables to recieve the mixer out with all the mics (8/cam).
Shotput Pro to offload P2 cards to two drives at the same time.

If you look at the image, everything to the right of the computer is ready to go. i.e. charged, offloaded and/or formatted. I generally turn the P2 card landscape if it has NOT been formatted and portrait if it has. You don't see it here, and the chargers have been moved, but all cards shot have their tab pulled and placed left of the computer. The battery charges are to the left of the computer and all batteries that need to be charged are placed there for their turn.

A helpful hint: When running a system like this, offset your cards so as to minimized downtime. So, in Cam A start shooting to a 32GB card and have Cam B shoot to a 16. Cam A should shoot to a 16BGB after the 32GB and Cam B should shoot to a 32GB after the 16GB. If they both shoot to the same sized cards then you'll have two cards that need to be offloaded at the same time and this can really back up realtime offloading. So, in doing this you'll minimized the amount of time cards are sitting around to be offloaded.

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