After around three years of using a digital workflow I’ve amassed a lot of data, my source clips alone use up around 6TB of hard drive space, add to that working files, transcoded scratch files, renders and all the other bits and bobs that get generated when working on a project and you start to need a lot of space on your computer system.  Today I’m still shooting on the EX1, but the problem has only gotten worse with the addition of two DSLR’s, two GoPro’s and the Zoom h4n all filling up cards at silly rates.

Up until now I’ve simply been adding more hard-drive capacity to cope with demand, my mac is maxed out with four 2TB internal hard drives, a 2TB G-Raid scratch disk and an 8TB drobo which is struggling to keep everything backed up using time machine. My mac is once again nearing being full and with 2TB SATA drives still being the largest capacity available I really needed to come up with a way of offloading the older footage and freeing up my system for new files.

So let me talk about some of the options that I’ve looked into and then I’ll go on to describe what I’ve decided to do to tackle this ever growing problem.

Hard Drives
The good thing about hard drives is that they are one of the cheapest ways to store your files, with a 2TB drive costing around £100 that works out at approximately 0.5 pence a GB per drive.

Apparently hard drives have a tendency to seize up if not used for a few years and of course they are quite fragile devices. Drop a hard drive and all the data contained within it could be lost forever, unless of course you can afford to have it recovered by one of those super expensive clever people that can rebuild drives in a secret underground lab somewhere!

I’m a big believer in making sure that anything stored on hard drives is on at least two of them. Even if I’m using a drobo which mirrors the data across multiple drives I still make sure I have a backup on another drive outside the drobo. If a drive fails in the drobo then all is not lost, but what happens if the drobo fails and kills all of it’s drives? Call me paranoid but you can’t be too careful with anything that claims to look after your precious data.

Tape Backup
Tape systems such as LTO drives are designed with backups in mind, they provide a reasonably fast data transfer and the media is cheap. The drives themselves are quite expensive starting from around £1,000 and quickly heading into £2,500 plus for the most up to date systems. The tapes themselves offer one of the cheapest options for storing data, an LTO4 tape can store 800GB of uncompressed data and only costs around £25.

The downside with tape is that when you need to access the files you’ve backed up it can be a royal pain getting them back off of the tapes. I think as a backup system for use in data loss emergencies they do a great job, but for archiving they’re just not the right technology.

Sony Pro Disks
This was the technology I was most excited by when I started looking for an archiving solution, after all Sony must have thought about the workflow issues when they invented SxS and the Pro Disk seems like the answer. Unfortunately though it doesn’t appear to be ideal. Firstly the PDW-U1 drive costs a whopping £2,841. I’m not sure what technological goodness they packed into that little box but it must be extremely clever at that price. The disks themselves are around £45 for 50GB.

Sony Professional disks are used in the XDCAM range of cameras which record directly on to the disks allowing you to simply archive the actual disks at the end of a shoot and charge the media cost on to your client. I really like the thought of working that way but unfortunately if like me you’re shooting on an XDCAM-EX camera though you’d need to copy the footage from your SxS cards over to the pro disks at the end of every shoot.

I’ve been doing a little research into this and apparently it takes around 40 minutes to copy just 17GB of data. That doesn’t make it a practical solution at all. If I come back from a shoot with 60GB of footage on three SxS card it’s going to take three hours or more to transfer everything, and that’s with me being there to swap disks. That’s not going to work!

BD-R & DVD-R
I know a lot of people backup to DVD and Blu-ray disks but personally I don’t trust re-writable DVD’s and BDR’s as far as I could throw them, which thinking about it might be quite far if using the Frisbee technique!. You get my meaning though.  Some reports claim that the life span of these re-writable disks is less than three years if kept in ideal conditions and considerably less if not cared for properly. For me that’s just not reliable enough to be storing my footage on so I’m not even considering these at all.

So what’s the answer?
In all honesty I’m not sure there is a good answer at the moment. There really doesn’t seem to be a system that provides reliable long term offline storage with fast data transfer,  low cost media and easy access to files. I’ve read that Sony are working on a ‘one time write’ system that uses 128GB optical disks with a long life-span but that’s no use to me until it gets released and there’s no mention of write times yet.

So for now I’m going to keep going the way I have been and use hard drives. Today I’ve blown £1,100 on another drobo, this time the drobo fs model packed with five 2TB drives which is going to become my new backup drive. I’ll use my existing 8TB drobo as a footage storage device. I know I have to archive some data so I’ve also come up with a plan for that.

Of the four 2TB drives I have in my mac, two of them contain footage that’s getting quite old and isn’t likely to be needed very oftem. My plan is to use a pair of 2TB external drives and copy the data from my internal drives onto the external drives. I’ll then pull out the internal drives and store those off site somewhere whilst keeping the external drives here in case I need access to the data at any point.

I know it’s not ideal to store drives without firing them up regularly, but it really does seem like the best option for now. Hopefully Sony or somebody else will address this problem soon, I’m sure I’m not the only person struggling to know what to do with all the data I’m accumulating.

let me know your thoughts and any solutions that work for you.

Canon EF 24-105mm F4 IS USM Lens for video

Do I really need another lens?

I also own a Canon 70 – 200 2.8 IS lens which is fantastic, quite often I’ll prefer the results from that over my primes it really depends on what it is I’m shooting and the type of result I’m looking for. The Image Stabiliser on that lens is excellent and even though it makes lot of noise it makes handholding such a long lens quite easy.

One time when primes become a bit of a pain though is for event work. I took my 5D along with the 50 and 24 to my recent shoot for Harley-Davidson in St Tropez and although both lenses produced nice results, it seemed that the moment I swapped the lenses a shot would present itself where I felt like I wanted to swap them again. I really don’t like swapping lenses more than I have to in the field as it’s way too easy for grit, dust and other nasties to get inside the cameras.

So, for my next event for Harley which takes place in Barcelona next weekend I’ve decided to try out the Canon EF 24-105mm f4 L IS USM Zoom. Now at F4 this is by no means a fast lens, it’s not going to be on my 5D when I head out in the evenings but for daytime use I think it’s going to be a lovely lens giving me a nice range to work with without swapping lenses. It’s also not going to deliver the extremely shallow depth of field that my primes can, but again that’s not something I really need for handheld work at events.

When choosing this lens I considered another 24 – 70 2.8, but the 24-105 has some advantages over the 24-70 which are very important for event work. Firstly, and most importantly it has IS (Image Stabilisation) which works wonders for handheld video use. Dealing with camera shake is one of the hardest things about working with DSLR’s so having IS helps a lot.  When I get back from Barcelona I’ll post some examples of how much it helps.

The other advantage the 24-105 has over the 24-70 is that it’s quite a lot lighter, for event work carrying the 5D around as well as my EX1 weight can be tricky, the less weight I have to carry the better.

The 24-70 at f2.8 is obviously a few stops faster than the 24-105 and if you need a wide zoom to work in lower light situations as well then it would be a better choice. Even f2.8 can be a bit limiting in low light though so I’ll stick to my 50mm f1.2 and 24mm f1.4 for that.

The lens has literally just turned up this morning so I haven’t had much time with it yet, but from my first impressions it looks like  it’ll work a treat, the IS makes a huge difference and I can get shots which don’t look like handheld shots at all. As with all of Canon’s L Series lenses it appears to be built well and ready for the challenge ahead.

Although a lot quieter than the 70-200 the noise from IS on this lens would probably still be noticeable if using an on camera mic but for most of my usage that’s not a big issue as I generally use an external recorder for anything where I’m going to need the sound.

I’ll post more when I return from Barcelona and let you know how it worked out.

The Canon EF-24-105 F4 IS can be purchased in the USA from B&H for $1,059

In the UK Warehouse Express sell it for £929.99

I personally think we’ll see the buzz return to the traditional video camera manufacturers 12 months from now, which is quite an interesting thought considering that the whole aftermarket manufacturing industry currently seems to have gone DSLR crazy. A dedicated 35mm video sensor would be designed with HD video formats in mind so would no doubt avoid the line twitter / aliasing issues which are the result of DSLR’s sensors providing too much resolution. DSLR’s are always going to have to cater to photographers first.

Canon or even Nikon may be planning on delivering an uncompressed full res video output from a DSLR, but they are always going to have to deal with sensors that are designed with still images in mind and provide work arounds to the huge resolutions involved.

I think the whole DSLR thing has been fantastic, it gave the video giants a big kick up the behind and made them move forward a lot faster than that might have done otherwise. They seem to be moving though so it’s going to be very interesting to see which direction they go in.

I did plan on investing in an EX1r for this years event work but I think I’m going to try and make my trusty 3 year old EX1 last one more season now and see what Sony do with this new camera and what they mean by “more affordable”.

The thought of an XDCAM-EX or better body offering the features of an EX1r but using a 35mm sensor along with the possibility to use various types of 35mm lenses is really exciting. It’s hard to know if that’s what Sony have in mind at present, but it would certainly get the attention of all those videographers out there who have jumped on the DSLR band wagon and invested money in 35mm glass.

EX1 – over-cranking and audio
I shot the majority of this event using my EX1. I normally shoot these at 720/25p and switch on S&Q motion (overcrank) from time to time when I want some slow motion footage. The only problem with this approach is that the EX1 doesn’t record any audio when running S&Q. I ran into a problem last year when the client asked for audio from part of a sequence I’d shot in slow-mo so needed another approach this year.

I decided to do two things differently, firstly I took along my Zoom H4n audio recorder and whenever possible asked the guys running the sound desks to give me a feed so that I could have a non-stop audio recording regardless of what I did with the camera. I also decided to shoot the whole event in 720/50p mode so that I could create slow-mo in post using cinema tools and be able to use the footage on a 25p timeline with audio should I need it.

Shooting at 720/50 when you know you’re delivery will be at 25p means you have to be careful with shutter speeds. I normally have my shutter on the EX1 set to 180 degrees which results in each frame being exposed for 1/50th second. If I left that setting the same when shooting at 720/50 each frame would only be exposed for 1/100th of a second.

Because I planned to export the video back to 25p I turned the shutter off, effectively giving each frame 1/50th of a second of exposure giving it the same amount of motion blur as 25p in the hope it would produce similar results once reduced to 720/25. This theory didn’t really work out that well, when I imported my 50p clips into a 25p timeline the footage didn’t look as fluid as I’d normally expect from 25p. Edited on a 720/50p timeline the footage played correctly, but when exported out at 25p I still wasn’t overly happy with the results. I’ll need to look into this one a bit further.

One other downside to the 720/50 route to slow-mo is that cinema tools can’t conform XDCAM-EX footage, it needs to be transcoded to Pro-Res first which could take a lot of time considering I had hours of footage. I handled this by going through the footage and creating a sequence with all my favourite shots in which I then exported out as a 720/50p ProRes file which was then conformed in Cinema Tools and reimported for use in my edit.

Custom bike tracking shots
I used my 5D & glidetrack shooter rig during the events custom bike show.  As well as being a very light and portable rig for tracking shots the results are some of the nicest looking custom bike shots I’ve managed at an event so far, I’ll definitely be using it again. Using the Manfrotto 394 quick release plates to switch between tripod and ground shots worked a treat too.

Using the Canon 5D
I made the decision before leaving to shoot this event that I was going to shoot the majority of it on my Sony EX1 with the exception being the tracking shots on the glidetrack.

I did however also want to experiment with the 5D so I ventured out a couple of times with it on a DV Multirig. One area where the 5D shines is in low light environments so I took it instead of the EX1 when I headed out to film a couple of bands and the party goers watching them. Shots such as bar scenes and people dancing on the beach being lit by the stage lights were brought to life by the 5D where the EX1 would have either been dark shadows or a grainy mess. I did however discover a limitation with the 5D that I wasn’t aware of before this event.

I was shooting some guys riding Harleys through the event ground with their headlights on and noticed black dots appearing in the middle of the headlights. On reviewing the footage these black dots appear anywhere in the image that’s ultra bright. This also happened on occasion when shooting the bands and a stage light would shine on the camera, the light would become a small black spot on the image.

I’ve mixed up things quite a bit in the event video, to me the 5D shots are all very obvious but I’m not sure they always represent the best looking images. The tracking shots of the custom bikes look good, but some of the crowd shots from the event have a kind of “mobile phone” look about them rather than the deep focus, ultra clear HD images that the EX1 usually gathers.

Manfrotto Monopod
This was the first event I’ve shot where I took the Manfrotto monopod along. In theory the monopod should be ideal in this environment as it’s fairly low profile and yet allows for steady panning or tilting shots when required. In use though I found the monopod to be a bit of a failure. It was easier to carry than something like my Miller DS-2o tripod but I found it quite useless for trying to get smooth panning shots. Fast pans were a little better, but trying to pan slowly resulted in a kind of clicking action from the fluid cartridge in the base that was very visible in the resulting footage. I won’t be taking it again.

Workflow
My workflow changed slightly at this event mainly due to the use of the Nexto DI NVS2500. For footage offloads I continued what I’d started on the ride to the event by offloading my media cards to the NVS at the end of each day and then syncing it to an external drive.

I did have one scary moment when the external drive I was using developed some kind of fault that could only be fixed by formatting it and re-syncing. This took a couple of hours to complete, during which time I felt particularly vulnerable knowing the footage was solely on the NVS hard drive but the device performed perfectly and allowed me to re-sync my data once the external drive had been reformatted.

All in all the shooting at the event went well, I had no major problems with equipment etc. The weather even started to look up, we had the occasional shower but it stayed dry for the most part with a fair amount of sun thrown in.

The plan with the project was to shoot footage for a short documentary about a group of Harley riders making the trip from the UK to the Event in St Tropez via the Netherlands, Germany, Switzerland, Belgium and of course with the last part of the journey through France. Once at the destination I also needed to be able to cover the event for Harley-Davidson so that they could post video clips on their gallery website soon after the event.

Choosing the right bike
I too was riding a motorcycle so I had to spend a lot of time choosing the kit and the bike that would allow me to work efficiently with the minimum of gear. As you’ve probably seen from my previous posts I chose the BMW GS Adventure for this job as it offered everything I needed. Most important was plenty of fully waterproof luggage capacity, the GS was especially great in this department with it’s three fully waterproof aluminium boxes on the back, a tank bag and a lot of tie down points for things like tripods.

I hired the bike for two weeks from Superbike Rental who I have to say were fantastic. The bike was pretty much brand new and the service I received from them was second to none, I highly recommend them if you’re looking to hire a motorcycle in the UK.

The GSA was fantastic to ride, it was fitted with a full satnav system which proved to be invaluable at times but by far the best feature for this trip was it’s heated hand grips, I didn’t expect to be saying that when I hired the bike!

Camera options
When it came to choosing cameras I was torn between shooting with my trusty Sony EX1 or going with just my Canon DSLR’s. My initial thoughts were that main benefit of going with the Canon’s would be the small size and portability of the little cameras as well as the ability to gather some shallow depth of field footage which I know would work well with the subject matter at times.

After much thought and some testing however I felt that shooting everything with a DSLR wasn’t going to be practical for the project, the main reason for this was the inability to view the LCD from low angles and that I needed to have the ability to shoot both wide and on telephoto without swapping lenses. I know there are lenses out there that could offer this functionality but I wanted to work with what I already own, which are mostly prime lenses other than my 70-200 2.8. Packing 3 or 4 primes soon makes the DSLR package less compact than something like an EX1 as well.

In the end I decided to use the best of both. I packed my EX1 along with a shotgun mic and batteries in one of the bikes panniers and then put the 5D fitted with my 50mm 1.2 prime in the the tank bag. This turned out to be a really practical solution because if I needed to grab a shot quickly I simply had to stop the bike and grab the 5D from the tank bag without getting off.

Occasionally I’d go ahead of the group and they’d give me a few minutes to get set up before passing me, for those shots I tended to grab the EX1 and shoot at 50fps giving me the option of slowmo in post.

Zoe fitted with a GoPro HD Hero

I also took two GoPro HD Hero’s with me, the plan for these was to move them around between riders and grab shots of the riders as well as POV shots. This worked pretty well although the plan was a bit thwarted by the weather, more about that in a bit. I build a mount using a Manfrotto super-clamp and a cine-arm which worked well for positioning the camera in different locations on the bikes.

Accessories
As well as the cameras I obviously needed to take a few other bit’s and pieces on the bike. I was able to send some gear ahead of me in a flight case but I wouldn’t get that until i arrived at the event so I needed to make sure I had all the basics with me for the riding phase. On the bike I had chargers, various cables, a shotgun mic, my NVS2500, two 500GB hard drives, my Miller DS20 tripod, my Glidetrack Shooter, Rode videomic, ND fader & other filters for the 5D, rain covers for both cameras, an LED light, a 5 way power outlet with a Euro adapter fitted, my Zoom H4n and all of the required bits and bobs that those things need.

My kit filled the top box and the biggest pannier on the right side of the bike, the pannier on the left had my clothes and shoes inside with the tripod and glidetrack strapped on top in a Manfrotto tripod bag.

Data Wrangling
I didn’t want to take my laptop on the bike as a 17″ macBook Pro isn’t the most compact of machines and space was very limited. So, for on the road backups and card emptying duties I used my Nexto Di NVS2500. The NVS worked a treat throughout the whole trip, I’d simply offload every card I’d used during the day and then do a sync of the data on NVS onto an external drive. Once the footage was on the NVS and a backup drive I would empty the cards ready for the next days shooting. I used a 500GB lacie drive for syncing which was powered by one of my Sony BPU-60′s using the adapter supplied by Nexto.

The only time I really missed my laptop when offloading footage was just to be able to view a selection of clips to reinforce to myself that I had the data before deleting the clips from my media cards. To be fair the NVS can do this with SxS cards from the EX1 but at this time I couldn’t do the same with 5D or GoPro footage. I think this is something Nexto will be adding at a later date though. Using GoPro’s is especially hard without a laptop as you have no way at all to see what you’ve recorded. Luckily one of the riders brought along a small macbook so I was able to check the GoPro footage a couple of times.

Batteries & Charging
On the bike I had 2 x Sony BPU-60′s 6 x Canon Lp-E6′s, and 6 x GoPro batteries. The Canon & Sony batteries were easy to stay on top off, I didn’t use a whole battery in either the Canon or the Sony in any given day. In fact I only charged those once during the riding phase of the trip.

The GoPro batteries on the other hand were more of a challenge because I used all of the batteries up each day. To charge a GoPro battery it needs to be in the camera itself which then needs to be connected to a USB port. If I’d had a laptop with me this wouldn’t have been a huge issue but without one it became my biggest challenge each night.

I used a standard iPhone charger to power the GoPro’s as it uses a standard 5v USB output. I planned to take two of those but for some reason forgot one so ended up constantly battling to swap batteries in a goPro during the evenings and night-times in order to get as many batteries charged as possible ready for the next day.

Shooting the riding out phase of the trip
During the planning of this trip  I was more than aware that there was a chance that we could get some rain at times so I went to a lot of trouble to make sure my kit could be made watertight. I had all my kit in BMW’s watertight pannier bags which fit inside the also watertight panniers. Boy did that turn out to be a wise decision!

During the ride to St Tropez we rarely saw the sun, it was generally cloudy / stormy weather with pleanty of rain thrown in for good measure, not just regular everyday rain either but torrential rain, hail, extreme winds, cold and even lighting tried it’s best to stop us in our tracks!

The BMW’s waterproof panniers kept everything nice and dry, but the additional waterproof liners were also great because when I had to open the panniers I could do so without the contents getting soaked by the rain. The only things that really suffered a few soakings were my Miller tripod and the glidetrack as the manfrotto tripod bag strapped to the pannier on the left of the bike wasn’t waterproof at all.

The weather was a nightmare on the cameras, the GoPro’s are waterproof, but the footage doesn’t look great with rain drops running across the lens and they have a tendency to fog up when it’s raining too which renders the footage useless. It’s quite demoralising to position a camera on a rider or a bike and then check it an hour later after riding through some amazing scenery to find it had fogged up within the first few minutes.

I still managed to get some nice footage on the 5D and EX1 but the cameras can only capture what’s on front of them which most of the time was just cold wet people riding dirty bikes under dull grey skies. Not exactly what I had in mind for this project.

We rode through some fantastic places, over mountains and through impressive gorges that on a better day would have looked stunning so we did do some exciting stuff, it just didn’t look that good on camera when we were there unfortunately. At one point we were in the alps and the temperate got down to 2 degrees. enough to make the BMW give me an ice warning!

So all in all the shooting of the ride out to St Tropez was defeated by the weather. I did get some nice shots but certainly not enough to make the documentary I’d planned. Maybe the trip home would provide more options, better weather and chances of some decent footage?

In part 2 I’ll be talking about my workflow at the event, my thoughts on using the 5D for event work and how the glidetrack shooter enabled me to offer something new for the client.

The shoots have all been done as per my DSLR Interview workflow post, the only thing I’ve changed over the last couple of days is that I’ve been using both cameras without rails, matte-boxes and follow focus. Because I’m having to move around a lot I’ve been trying to keep my cases as light as possible so anything not essential had to go.

Here’s a quick snap I took on the iPhone today and a screen grab from each camera. The Camera on the left is a Glidetrack mounted Canon 7D fitted with a 35mm 1.4 lens & Rode videomic. The Canon 5D mark II is on the right mounted on my Miller DS20 tripod and fitted with a Canon 70-200 2.8, Rode videomic and LCDVF.

I recorded audio using a Sony ECM-77 lav mic running into a UWP-V1 wireless kit and recorded on my Zoom H4n.

Click here to read the review and comment.

One thing that is a bit annoying when using Fader ND’s though is that it’s no longer possible to attach the Canon sun hoods that are supplied with the lenses.

While I was out shooting some external pickup shots yesterday I experimented with using a Hoya Screw in Rubber lens Hood on my 50mm 1.2 and 35mm 1.4 lenses. It’s quite strange using these on the fader ND because to adjust the level of ND you end up rotating the entire lens hood, it works well though!

The Hoya hoods are able to be set in two positions allowing you to use them with a range of lenses from medium wides out to zooms.

Unfortunately the Hoya hoods only go up to 77mm which means they can only be used on lenses up to 72mm in diameter because the Fader ND’s step up a size. Both my 35mm 1.4 and 50mm 1.2 have a 72mm thread so the 77mm Hoya Hood work well on those. On the 35mm the hood needed to be in it’s closed down setting so that it didn’t appear in the shot on my 5D mark2.

My 24mm 1.4 and 70 – 200 2.8 are 77mm so with a 77mm fader ND fitted the hoods won’t work on those as the required diameter is then 82mm. The 24mm would likely be too wide for the sun hood anyway, plus the Fader ND’s are not recommended on long zooms so you probably wouldn’t want to use the hoods on either of those lenses anyway.

By far the best feature of the Hoya hoods has to be the red line on the end – full on L series looks for just a few $! ;)

Buying in the US: B&H sell the Hoya hoods for around $25.

Buying in the UK: Warehouse express sell the Hoya hoods priced from £12 – £40 depending on size.

If you’re looking for Fader ND filters they can be purchased from B&H for $62 – £139 depending on the lens diameter you need.

My kit and workflow was exactly as described previously in my DSLR Workflow post. If you have any questions please don’t hesitate to post a comment and ask.