Preparing SSDs for recording on a Mac

Let's go over how to format an SSD on a Mac. Now, remember, the SSD needs to be of the supported type to work with the Blackmagic camera. Take the card and attach it to some sort of drive sled. Some folks use docks. In my shop we use a thunderbolt sled that's designed to hold portable laptop drives or barebone drives. You'll see that it has a connection point here. Try to avoid touching it directly. I'll usually unplug the sled first so there's no power running through it. Line it up and make the connection, and gently push until it attaches.

It's not uncommon for a barebone drive like this to have a small gap below. So be careful not to press down or apply any pressure to bend the pins. Once that's done, you can connect the Thunderbolt cable, or the USB 3 cable depending upon the dock that you're using. After a second, the drive should spin up and appear inside of your computer. In this case, I'm using Apple Disk Utility. If you haven't already launched it, you can choose it under the Go menu by choosing Utilities. Shift + Cmd + U.

Then, simply double-click Apple Disk Utility to launch it. Once that's done, you'll be able to see the actual card itself. Select the card at the base level. Now, choose the Erase tab. You'll notice from the Format pop-up menu, several choices. You're either going to want to go with Mac OS X Extended (Journaled), which will create an SSD that can only be easily read on a Mac, or choose the more broader compatible exFAT. The benefit exFAT is it'll work on both Mac or PC.

Click the erase button, and then confirm that you want to erase the file. It may fail the first time, requiring you to do it a second time. You could track the progress there at the bottom as it builds the volume. When it's done, it should show up. If the erased volume is the wrong format, simply choose exFAT a second time. And erase it again. Sometimes it takes two passes to get it done successfully. In this case it's being a little bit challenging, but in this case it did eventually update to exFAT.

You also may choose to select the Parent Disk Level, and specify the format there. Make sure that before you remove the card, it is in the correct format. It is very easy to have a card incorrectly formatted, even if you choose the right preset. You want to read it over and make sure that it ends up in either Mac OS X Extended (Journaled) or exFAT. In this case, I'm verifying the reformat. You'll notice it's still being persistent, so let's select the individual volume, and that does read as exFAT, so that's going to work.

You may need to first reformat the parent volume, then take a look at the child volume. Once that's done you can click Eject and when the card unmounts you'll see it disappear from this list. If it still appears in the list it is not yet completely unmounted. So you may want to click the Eject button to ensure that it's removed, and once it disappears, you could safely unplug from your computer. The drive is done and it's ready to put back into the camera. Now remember, you cannot delete clips in a camera, nor can you format cards.

So you're almost always going to be bringing a laptop on set, either a Mac or a PC. Let's see how to format the card, over on the Windows side.