Let's say I have 6 hours of footage from a wedding shot with Sony vx2100's and canon gl2's. What is the fastest way to download the footage?
I have several PC's. Should I just download each camera to it's own PC and network the footage together?

Thanks, Rolalnd

I suppose you could capture on one system at the same time that you capture on another with an external hard drive. Then you could just move the hard drive when you are done...

Or you could buy those trays that allow quick swapping of drives between computers. Then do the same as above.

Networked/shared storage for video is usually an expensive proposition. If you are just sharing the drives from the other computers, and only editing on one, I've read that you can cut one stream of DV over a gigabit network connection, though I've never tried it.

Are you doing an event where you have to hand over the footage right away or something? Set it and go eat or browse the forums...2 hours isn't that long...

Paul

6 hrs...

capture 1st hour on main editing box, then at teh same time (if u have 2 playback devices) capture tape 2 on another box with external or rack drives... i use racks.. and externals as backups..

start editing hour 1, while u continue to capture on the other machine.
ideally, youd run and ide or sata interface, USB2 maybe, and firewire id be very wary of (ive lost 4 drives with 1394 linkups to the pc.. this is a windows issue not a drive issue... ) hence why i use USB2 now.. it juices out more cpu but at least its stable..

as for "downloading" I assume that your mean capture.. if u actually mean DOWNLOADING.. pls confirm and i'll blab on about what i do when i need to upload files to FTP's for international clients

capture to separate pc's at the same time then copy from one to the other. Use gigabit nic cards. The portable HD would save you the copy time but if you don't have one the above method would be the fastest.

It would take about 20 -30 minutes to copy the captured footage from the 2nd pc, it would take an hour to capture the second tape on just one pc

MUST HAVE THE GIGABIT NICS or it will be much slower w/ 100mb nic cards

Scenalyzer Live will accept multiple firewire inputs on one computer. You might try running it two or three times and seeing if it works. I'd probably tra capturing to different drives, though.

Play Press Record & then come back after 6hours... I am serious.

The fastest way to dump footage form a Linear source to a Non linear thing is to play record & come back back after the desired time interval.

If you still wish to go faster then invest if you can in a DVCPRO50 equipment where you have a choice to play probably 8x faster & dump on the Panasonic's Edit Box. Otrwise sit back for 6hours & enjoy your shoot.

Secondly buy Six Players & Six editing Boxes & watch the magic your 6hours footage gets dumped in 1hour flat. Nothing will ever work faster then this.

Now in the whole while since you have posted the search on this forum you would have by now completed the dump of 6hour footage on ONE Edit Box from One playback source.

Gawd....

Scenalyzer Live will accept multiple firewire inputs on one computer. You might try running it two or three times and seeing if it works. I'd probably tra capturing to different drives, though.
Funny u shoud mention that, ive tried this, with 4 cameras on 4 different drives, and the program crashes... i need to kill the cameras to get the system back up and running..

Im only running service Pak1, so i dont know if that makes a difference.. it shoudlnt, but for me, Scenelayzer dont work.. which is a bummer.. :(

Thanks for the helpful responses. As for the patronizing rude one, I'll forgive you :) It's just a messaging board after all :)

The reason I asked is because one of my videographers has to work on footage away from the house and it is very ineffcient to drive to the office and spend 6 hours downloading/babysitting stuff before you can begin a project.

Peace, Rolland

The reason I asked is because one of my videographers has to work on footage away from the house and it is very ineffcient to drive to the office and spend 6 hours downloading/babysitting stuff before you can begin a project.

A couple other ideas: capture the most critical footage on hard disk recorders like the Firestore, or have a laptop at the event with an inexpensive DV camera to start capturing tapes as you finish recording them. Or have your second videographer capture half the tapes to an external hard drive while you do the same with the other half of the tapes, then meet up to duplicate all your captured files to each other's drives. Having two capture computers involved should cut the capture time almost in half: three hours on each computer plus the time required to duplicate three hours of video files from each computer to the other. Plus that way you'd have two full copies of all your captured footage, so if something happens to the drive with one copy you don't have to recapture again.