We had a total of eight 128GB SxS cards with us that could each hold about 45 minutes of 4K footage. While we were prepared to off-load cards during the shooting day if we ever ran out of card capacity, that never happened. There were only one or two days when we used all eight cards but six cards per day was typical. Doug suggested we label the SxS cards “A” through “H” so it was easy to keep track of them. We used a system of wrapping rubber bands around empty cards so that the cameramen could immediately distinguish between used cards and empty cards. We never once accidentally erased a card or had to wonder if a card had been used or not. It didn’t matter to Doug if the cards were used in alphabetical order or which camera used which card, but having unique labels helped keep things straight at the end of the day. Our computer for the production was a bare-bones, refurbished 13" MacBook Pro with only four gigabytes of RAM. Doug was initially worried that the computer would be under-powered to keep up with the archiving and editing, but it proved to be up to the task. We also brought a cheap 13" external computer monitor to help with some much needed extra screen space for editing and grading. Our backup plan for the footage was simple. At the end of each day Doug would collect the SxS cards from the cameramen and set-up an “ingest station” in whatever hotel room we happened to be in that night. Before leaving for France, we had decided that we would avoid using LTO drives, raids, or anything else that might cause us grief if it broke down while we were on the road. Instead, we opted for a daily routine of backing up each SxS memory card onto two separate hard drives so there would always be at least two copies of every clip. We had several dozen 4TB and 1TB Seagate drives that were used for the backups, we modified two Pelican cases to transport them safely and securely. A big advantage of the Seagate drives was that they could be used via USB 3.0 or Thunderbolt, depending on the adapter that was attached to them. This really came in handy when the USB 3.0 hub died during the second week of the shoot, and we couldn’t locate a replacement hub in France. With other drives this would have caused a huge bottleneck with the archiving because the MacBook Pro is woefully short on ports. But we just converted some of our Seagate drives to Thunderbolt and went on working. The card reader we used was a Sony SBAC-US20 that is bus-powered and uses USB 3.0. With this hardware setup, we could ingest and backup each 128GB SxS card in about 25 minutes. This proved to be amazingly fast!
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