Hi All,
Yesterday had a shoot with three XDcamEX cameras, all shooting continuously for well over an hour, and I was the one who had to transfer all the data to the producer's hard drive after the shoot. Last time I did one of these shoots it took seemingly forever to transfer the producer's data using my laptop. We couldn't set up an area until after the shoot was over, and the producer's Lacie Rikki drive really felt slow.
This time around I knew we would get kicked out of the location pretty quickly, so I was faced with possibly doing a full load out followed by setting up my computer at another location (starbucks?) and starting from scratch with the transfers.
I've typically been doing producer transfers with my laptop, and using my NEXTO 2500 for a separate backup copy, but this time I decided to go with Multi-copy as my main transfer protocol.
IT WORKED BETTER THAN I HAD IMAGINED !!
I 'attached' the producer's drive to the NEXTO 2500 with a couple of strong rubber bands to hold it locked in place (the drive had an attached usb cable that goes into the eSata/USB Host connector) - and was able to assemble the rig pre-shoot and found a wall plug for the AC adapter. Within one minute after the shoot, I was multi-transferring the first 32GB card. Obviously the multi-transfer is slower than the native NEXTO2500 internal transfer, but the data rate (around 1.5GB/minute) still seemed to be almost twice as fast as it had been with my laptop!
Final result - 75% of the transfers for all 3 cameras were done by the time we had all the equipment in cases -- and the entire transfer was finished before the cases were in the vehicles.
Producer got all his data, and I didn't have to go through contortions to get it done!
It's so great when things actually work the way you hope.
THANKS NEXTO !!