Canon XF305 external recorder

[Kathy Smith]

Hi,

I will be shooting a 2 day conference and I'm trying to figure out how I can manage recording such a long event. I normally just record to CF cards but for 2 days I need another solution. Any recommendations?

[Christopher Young]

One option that could work with the XF-305.

If you can beg, borrow or steal, or hire an Atomos Samurai Blade with a 500GB drive you would have a pretty good solution for long record sessions. If you are not running around madly this can use a cheapish, around $70 hard drive, doesn't need to be an SSD and it will give around twelve hours recording of ProRes LT. ProRes can be edited on either Mac or Windoz so no real issues there.

Three Sony NP-F970 batteries will power a Samurai Blade for a day. I recently did a non-stop gig of 4hr 55 mins record time and the whole session used just one F970 battery. It was nearly flat but had that have happened it would have switched over to the second battery automatically. You can hot swap batteries on the Blade. All in all I find this combo is great for long corporate gigs, concerts etc in either SD or HD.

Samurai Blade | Atomos

Chris Young
CYV Productions
Sydney

[Mark Koha]

+1 on the Samurai. I use the same setup of a 305 and Samurai Blade. I love the thing.

[Kathy Smith]

Thanks a bunch!

[Al Bergstein]

+1 on the Blade. A great product. I use an SSD with it.

[Steve Hontz]

I did a two-day conference with an XF305 and XF105. I have 4 CF cards for each camera.

As each card filled up, I would take it out and load it onto a laptop equipped with an external USB 3 card reader. A previously-formatted empty card would take its place.

At break times, I would copy the most-recently copied contents from the laptop hard drive to an external USB 3 hard drive, so I would have two copies. Also, I would format any cards that had been successfully copied so they would be ready to go in the rotation.

[Kathy Smith]

Originally Posted by Steve Hontz

I did a two-day conference with an XF305 and XF105. I have 4 CF cards for each camera.

As each card filled up, I would take it out and load it onto a laptop equipped with an external USB 3 card reader. A previously-formatted empty card would take its place.

At break times, I would copy the most-recently copied contents from the laptop hard drive to an external USB 3 hard drive, so I would have two copies. Also, I would format any cards that had been successfully copied so they would be ready to go in the rotation.

What was the capacity of each card? Did you have enough time in between to copy each card to the computer before running out of cards?

[James Redmond]

Kathy, I also have a 305 and a 105.

I use both 128 gigs and 64 gig cards

64 gig is 163 minutes of HD video (1920-1080) 50 mbps
128 would be 326 minutes.

Get a USB3 CF card reader (if you have a computer that uses usb3). It will speed it up by 10 times over usb2 the transfer speed.

During the breaks is when I start to transfer files. 4 CF cards will do (even 64 gigs),

at nanoflash dot com you can get a 128 gig CF for $200. I just got one for my last event.

Good luck, James

[Scott Brooks]

James ... good info on CF cards. I just purchased the XF200 and was wondering about the size cards I needed.

Just one correction though on the Nano site ... I believe that should be dot net.

[Steve Hontz]

Originally Posted by Kathy Smith

What was the capacity of each card? Did you have enough time in between to copy each card to the computer before running out of cards?

My cards are 32GB cards = 82 mins each (at 1920x1080 24p.) I don't have a full card to test with right now, but as I recall, it takes about 7 mins to download a full card to the laptop. Because I used the relay record, I could just pull cards when they filled up and stick in a fresh card without stopping.

I don't like having one big card. In case the card fails (or you accidentally wipe it) you've lost everything.