Hi guys,

Having never recorded with the 550D, I am just wondering what the best option would be. Just to have loads of 16GB Class 6 cards (most affordable), or some sort of portable back-up hard drive which reads SD cards (if such things exist). I am mainly shooting short films, however there may be the odd bit of paid work here and there as well.

If cards would be my best option, how many would I need? Or if just a couple of cards and a back-up hard drive would be the way to go, can you reccomend one? (which is affordable enough to make it viable when compared to just having heaps of cards).

- Andrew

Do a search for Nexto or Hyperdrive. I use a Hyperdrive Colorspace UDMA with 500gig and 640gig drives, it's about $250CDN for the device itself, and you can install your own HD. Depending on the speed of the card, it typically downloads about 2gigs/minute.

Personally I never overwrite my cards until the project is finished. Currently I have a few cards on rotation but my GH1 is not my primary, icamera, so it doesn't shoot too much.

However, later this year I will be taking my GH1 with me to Hawaii for a month as my A-camera for the first time (every other time has been with a tape-based camera). I wont have enough cards to last me a month (2-3 cards a day = 60+ cards!), So I'm considering using USB flash drives as my backup. A 4gb stick costs about the same as a miniDV tape, and while 4gb is small for aquisition, once I get rid of all the crap clips and throw away junk stuff, I think I can fit a days worth of stuff onto a 4gb drive quite easily. Then I'll have one copy on my hard drive and the flsh drive will be my backup/archive.

In any case, with flash media the best option is to have multiple copies. So even if you get something like the Nexto, do not ever format you cards on set. Keep all your footage on your cards until you know that you have duplicates on the Nexto and your computer hard drive. And don't delete the files off the nexto until you've got it copied to a second hard drive or onto DVD's or Blu-Ray's for archive.

While I love flash media and the speed of the workflow, I really do hope that SD cards become cheap enough to be considered one-time use media. I would love to be able to have 100 spare cards in my office/backback at all times, and be able to shoot, label, capture and archive them just like with tape.