While this is my first English post on my Slovenian based blog, let me start with a topic I’m having big trouble making right decisions. It’s about newer equipment – specially well known Sony FS700 camera in combination with new Odyssey7Q recorder. Everyone would be; “Woooow, that’s great stuff there, man! I wan’t that too!” But, after reading all of this, would you really still want it, or if I ask differently; are you able to find a low-cost solution of archiving all the shoot material. Just buying camera and recorder demands buying a lot more TB of hard drives, faster docks for quicker downloading, computer with more USB3 inputs, more SSD’s for recorder, better computer to process all this material…. and so on. It newer stops.

Le me get this straight. My Canon 5D Mark III is really a great camera for video shooting. I still do a lot of projects with it, because of it’s versatility, compact design, fullframe sensor, great video codec and has great Canon lenses and interesting old m42 bajonet manual lenses. It’s best gun and run camera when I’m out having a biking tour. I can pack everything to small backpack, add small tripod and clip a pocket travel jib to bike. One of best upgrades was RAW video with Magic Lantern. This was my first step in to RAW “industry”. It has so much more data in every frame, it’s almost criminal activity to shoot in ordinary video codec. BUT, for the cost of much pricier faster Compact Flash cards, and a lot of them. Just one card is full in 20minutes of shooting. That’s nothing when doing a directed video production. And just 20min is 60GB of footage. That means more hard drives to storage such mass. It’s still in reach of covering expense when doing a project.

And now comes the Sony FS700 with Odyssey7Q and RAW recording. Just 11 minutes of slow motion shooting is 500GB material. DUDE! ELEVEN MINUTES OF SHOOTING IS 500 GIGABYTES OF FOOTAGE. Just one hard drive of 1TB cost’s you about $70.  That means, that shooting too much slow motion will quickly raise that expense for hard drives in to thousand of dolars worth storage. And that is not all. Even the special SSD drives for recorder costs about $300 each. And because just two of them aren’t enough on a project, you have to buy few terabytes of them too. You can quickly calculate just costs of storage on a set and storage per project to be able to work. You get a new very good car for all of that money. Maybe even a brand new Toyota GT86. <3

Story of cost’s doesn’t end here boys and girls. What about downloading and processing such mas of files? You need more USB3.0 docks to be able to download from SSD drives. And just one 240GB drive needs about an hour to download over USB 3.0 to external bigger drives. So you need at least 4 USB3.0 ports (which are rare on PC’s. Forget about MAC’s) to be able to download let’s say 6 SSD’ to external hard drives in 3 hours. This is only theoretical time. If you’ll be in a hurry to next project, bu-hu, buy even more SSD drives.

So, again I ask. You still want this fancy better equipment for work? Yea, maybe if you earn enough to cover all these expenses, cover the expense of using the equipment and you still have enough to give yourself a salary. Then you’re good to go. Otherwise, forget about it.

Stay focused!

Regards
Juvan