Should I Buy A Hard Drive?

I asked my friends and colleagues at the Washington, DC area Women in Film and Video (WIFV) if it was time for me, as an independent and freelance producer, to buy my own hard drive.  The resounding answer was “yes.”

Some people, like Stephanie Foerster Owner of StepFilms, says the question takes some consideration.  “If you are responsible for the footage upon conclusion of the shoot, then yes, a hard drive is a great investment. That said, if you are simply handing over the footage for post, I think it’s fair to request the client to provide their own drive before the shoot.”

There are a lot of hard drives out there and not all of them will work for every situation.  For instance, are you looking for a hard drive to simply store and transport footage?  If so, a small drive will work.  The most popular compact drive suggestion I got was for the 350gb LaCie.  I’m using this drive now (in fact it is packed up ready for my shoot today) and it seems both rugged and easy to use.  It doesn’t need a power cord because it runs off of the firewire cable. It costs about $100.  For Mac users, My Passport Studio has been recommended because it is small and very affordable.  Another recommendation is the $90 Smartdisk FireLite which holds about 80GB and fits in the palm of your hand.

But as Roland Hudson of Flipbook Productions points out, you will need something bigger and faster if you plan to edit from the drive.  Anything less than 1TB can make moving media on and off of the drive painstakingly slow.  The G-Raid mini, another highly recommended drive based on responses, runs about $300.

Bonnie Green, a Digital Assets Manager, warns not to store too much on one drive.  “I usually advocate digitizing your assets into a searchable database, then archiving physical assets in off-site storage. Never keep the two in the same location. Use the “what if” scenario in laying out your plan.  Also, using one hard drive for multiple clients may not be wise, as it only takes one corrupted file to ruin to the soup. Then, you’ve just screwed up your other clients’ stuff and made yourself look like a novice.”

The crowd was split on how “consumer” to go with these drives. Some felt that standard drives found at Best Buy to provide storage for a home computer wouldn’t suffice.  Others were excited about cheap and cheerful drives that could be bought for under 100-bucks.  Personally, I feel that is it worth a little extra to safeguard a client’s footage.

And last but not least, back up your footage!  Some producers use their drives as backups. Others store the footage on their computer.  It doesn’t really matter where you keep it just as long as you can get to that backed-up footage if needed.

Tape Labeling Etiquette

Yes, I am a tape labeling maniac.  I let every crew I work with know this about me.  I believe that every professional document is the ultimate communication device.  This is especially true for tape labels.  Yes, we are moving into a digital world where a lot of footage is moving around on drives.  But drives and discs sometime need labels.  And, tapes are not dead yet.  I don’t care about spelling. I’m not the best speller in the world myself but I do what to know what is on that tape.

Where did this labeling snobbery come from?  I lay the blame squarely at the foot of America’s Most Wanted.  I worked on the show early in my career and quickly learned the benefits of a well labeled tape.  At AMW, as at many places, the tapes moved between so quickly between so many people (producers, associate producers, shooters, transcribers, editors, production managers, etc.) that it was critical that all the pertinent information be placed on the label so that any person at anytime would know what was on that tape.  This point was driven home years later when I helped a production company sort through their archival tapes that were boxed and stored in a closet.  It was nearly impossible to tell what was what because the tapes were labeled with one word that meant nothing to anyone who was not there when the tape was shot.

Here is some basic tape information I like to include:

• Name of project, tape number, date
• Subject name, title, city
• Type of footage shot (interview, B-roll, stills)
• Technical specifications (frame rate and frame size)
• Audio info like what was recorded on each channel

If space allows, I’ll also include:

• Producer name
• Crew names
• Production company and telephone number (in case the tape gets lost in transit)

If I am working on a long shoot that will generate a lot of tapes, I pre-print labels with all the consistent information typed out.  I leave space to fill in information that will change from tape to tape like tape numbers and dates.

Now that I am supervising and executive producing more projects, I don’t go out into the field as much. But I do give a tape labeling demonstration every time I work with a new production staff after which I expect tape labels to come back full of significant information.