A quick question on CF cards

[Tom Gresham]

I sure understand having the file in two different places.

Toward that end, do the pros record to two cards at once? That way, you would have the files on two separate cards when shooting.

[Rodrigo Fajardo]

More than a pro or a noob matter, is that one should know when to make use of resources. If im shooting something unusual, involving a lot of money or requiring special effort in production, surely i will record twin cards and have a couple of HDD and a laptop next to me. As someone told before, if that is important for you, reduce the always latent risk.

I use to deal with a lot of software, licenses and technical information that in most cases is not easy to recover. I make a lot of use of it and i have up to 5 mirrored external HDD in case something happens, all in different safe places in my office. Then a flood came on last year and i lost everything. I never thought it could happen. Do not keep all your data in the same place, that was a hard way to learn.

[Vincent Oliver]

Funny line of questions so far.

Way back in my film days, did I shoot on two reels of film?

No, but given the things that could go wrong with processing,torn sprockets, hair in the gate etc.Maybe we should have.

With DV tape, did we make a backup on the day of shooting?

No, I have had several tapes snarl up in camera, and dropped frames on transfer etc. come to think of it what a time consuming affair tape became.

Now that we have solid state media, we have become obsessed with backing up, have we all lost confidence in technology?

I haven't lost any footage on CF or SD cards, this is more down to carefully managing my files and making sure they are transferred to a hard drive before anything else. Think about it, did you ever open a camera with exposed film still loaded?

CF, SD, SXS cards are very robust, they will take a lot of bad handling before you lose any material. I can't see the point of duplicating everything onto two cards, unless you are very insecure.

Just my thoughts for the day

[Charles Papert]

I have, in the past few years, lost footage on multiple occasions. Most of the time it was because of the recorder, and sometimes because of "operator error". I haven't yet had a specific piece of flash media fail that I know of.

The workflow on my current show is as follows: SXS cards (from the Alexa) are downloaded onto dual drives by my DIT and checksummed via Shotput as well as spot-checked. The drives are picked up twice a day and delivered to editorial. Once they are copied onto their server, the assistant editors go through all the footage to make sure it is intact and then send word to the DIT that he can reformat the cards. Knock on wood, so far we are covered--but after the experiences of the last couple years, I'm nervous about doing it any other way.