By David Miess, Psychic Bunny
Light carves through the darkness like a scythe, bringing the archeologist in touch with artifacts from a century ago. The year is 2114. The location is downtown Los Angeles. He gingerly walks through the ancient office, gaping at dusty cheesegrater Mac Pros like the inaugural visitor to a new museum. The man then stumbles upon a peculiar sight—hundreds of shiny silver bricks. What could this be? Didn’t people back then use small thumb drives?
In the world of film production, large-capacity hard drives are a necessity. At our hybrid media studio, Psychic Bunny, we rely on OWC drives for duplicating footage during shoots, transferring materials back and forth between servers, and as backup solutions. There’s nothing like the warm, fuzzy feeling you get on a shoot after you’ve duplicated that vulnerable little RED card to not one, but two Mercury Elite Pros—one as a main footage drive, and the other as a backup.
I grew up with FireWire 800, but once you ride the Thunderbolt, there’s no going back; we use a Thunderbolt-to-eSATA throttler to get the fastest transfer speeds. After I’ve checked every single clip on both drives and ensured that all the file sizes match, only then does the film crew get that little card back to be reused.
Jump-cut to a week or two later when the project is finished, and we’ll copy all the project files—documents, footage, renders, etc.—to both an LTO tape and to an OWC hard drive. The tape and drive are given corresponding backup names so that if either of them ever fails, there’s always a second copy to rely on. The LTO tapes are great for secure longevity, but if we ever need to quickly pull off archived files, I use the backup drives.
Of course, that’s of no concern to our future archeologist… He’s just excited to see rectangles again for the first time, for it is fashionable in 2114 for technology to be shapeless and invisible.
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Learn more about Psychic Bunny at www.psychicbunny.com.
MaX, that would not be fair to the hordes of us with older Macs like the MacPro’s that don’t have Thunderbolt or USB 3 ports. You obviously have never tried to edit something off of USB 2. It is too slow to work with (with the exception of nightly backups) so we need FireWire 800.
It would be the best if they could put Thunderbolt / USB 3 / FireWire 800 on them instead. That would be a dream come true! Then it could be used on legacy systems and the newest systems without any speed limits or problems. It would be the most versatile hard drive enclosure ever made.
I don’t know if it is technically even possible to do but at least I can dream about such a day.
Hello !
If you only have USB2 you should TRY formatting an external Hard drive as NTFS and instal 3rd party driver Paragon NTFS for Mac.
It works a treat for video and jpg’s on Mac Mini with Snow Leopard .Transfer rates are 5 to 10 % faster than a
Firewire 800 drive formatted for Mac
Just my experience !
Bob
What is OWC waiting for? Please, please, please, implement Thunderbolt ports in all your drives (just Thunderbolt 1 or Thunderbolt 2 and USB 3 will be fine – no need for legacy ports!!!), and particularly on:
Mercury Elite Pro
Mercury Elite Pro mini
Thanks!