From the course: Corporate Video

Importing the footage to a fast drive

From the course: Corporate Video

Start my 1-month free trial

Importing the footage to a fast drive

“

- Hey there, I'm Robbie Carman. - And I'm Rich Harrington. - Rich, this week we're gonna talk about transferring our interview shoot that we did in a previous week over to our computer and kind of working with that vertical video and horizontal video that we shot. Along the way we're gonna have to use some finessing of that vertical video to kind of extend the set. We'll actually get it all together in a Multicam project and edit it together. But let's first start out by talking about transferring footage. - Yeah, well, you might recall that last week we shot two separate interview angles with an ultra-compact kit. The idea was, if you had to travel with a kit that fit into one carry-on bag. So we shot 4K footage just to SD memory cards, very commonplace these days, and you might think that, with such simple cards, oh, you could just put this on any hard drive. But 4K footage, particularly compressed 4K, like you might get from a DSLR or a mirrorless camera, can actually be kinda taxing on a computer. - It's a little bit of a misnomer, right, that like, oh, we're gonna have all this 4K footage, and it's gonna be heavily compressed, so it's easier to work with. Well, yeah, that means less file size. But your machine's gonna have to be pretty up to snuff to handle that, especially as we move into UHD and 4K and beyond. Those codecs are pretty intensive when it comes to H.264, H.265 and so on. - So if you transfer these, ideally, you might have a fast external hard drive. A rated drive with performance. Now Rob's gonna use his internal laptop and you'll see varying performance stuff with that. - But that's actually a really good point that I wanna make is that the internal options are viable as well, given that they're fast enough and you have large-enough speed. In this particular system, I have two two-terabyte NVME drives. - Yeah, but you're not normal. - That's true. (both laugh) But, those are very quick drives capable of 2,000, 2500 megabytes per second in read speed. So they're gonna handle this footage with ease. And the biggest benefit of that is just in transferring. So if I take one of these and just pop it into my SD card slot over here, it will mount in just a second. Here, on my machine, I have a drive called Media. I'm just gonna show you how quickly an SSD drive can work, especially one of this speed. So I'm gonna go out to my memory card. There it is. And I'm just going to, just real quick, make a folder backup of my Media drive. Call this something like Multicam, go into there, and I'm just going to drag these three folders across. - [Rich] I notice you're taking all the data as opposed to just one folder. - [Robbie] Right, I wanna be sure that I have a complete copy of this card. So I'm gonna take that, drag it across my drive there. And you can see that's pretty quick. The limiting factor in this regard is probably gonna be the actual memory card itself. - [Rich] Yeah, 'cause these particular cards are about 95, a hundred megabits per second, so your hard drive is actually much faster than the card. - [Robbie] Significantly faster than the card can read. And that's actually an important point as well, is that when you're connecting memory cards to your machine if you don't have an internal reader like I do here, speed does matter. So Thunderbolt, USB 3.0 card readers, you're gonna get significantly faster speed out of those than you would a traditional USB 2.0 card reader, or even an internal reader. - [Rich] Yeah, I was gonna say, I've noticed that sometimes those external readers are significantly faster just because computer manufacturers are often assuming that you're just transferring some still photos, no big deal. You can get ultra-fast USB 3.0 or Thunderbolt card readers that will transfer the data more quickly. - And you might be thinking to yourself, Rob, why would you do this to your internal drive? Like, what if you need to pass this around, et cetera? I do both. I think redundancy, It's not a backup unless it's in multiple, three places or more. So I like to also bring things internally when I can. But then, also, of course, if I'm doing things externally, put them on multiple drives. - All right, so, either take advantage of more than one hard drive or, preferably, a fast hard drive. But, since we shot in 4K, this might be beefier than your system's worked with before. Now, lots of computers in 4K have become pretty common. But don't be surprised if this is the first time you've worked with 4K, if suddenly you go, oh, wait, I'm asking the computer to do four times as much data at once. Things can actually start to slow down. All right, well, once we get the footage into the system we're gonna move into the editorial environment where we're gonna create our camera angles. And we'll tackle that next.

Contents