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RAW photos and uncompressed HD video rushes are big! A project I filmed recently over two days weighs in with just over 50GB of HD1080i footage recorded by my Sony EX3 XDCAM. My Lightroom catalog is already 57.3GB of RAW photos although I only started shooting professionally sometime in the second quarter this year. Not hard to imagine how large a collection of raw material I will have collected by the end of the year!

The olden days

Before, I shot on DV tape or took photos saved as JPG, producing a relatively small amount of data that needed backing up. In all cases I simply made sure the original tapes were stored safely and copied the final project with associated footage to DVD and an external hard drive. So far this has worked pretty well and with the advent of “cloud” data storage (Amazon S3, Dropbox, SugarSync to name but three), I also had a neat way to backup, version and share files while keeping them in-sync across multiple computers.

Using this system with hundreds of Gigabytes of files will make you poor very quickly as well as max out your internet connection for long periods. Even when you are on fibre optic cable pushing 2MBit/s upload speeds, you can expect your 50GB of newly acquired data to take a while to upload to the notoriously slow servers of most cloud storage providers.

Backing-up to DVD results in not much more joy as you will need DVD-DL disks offering a measly 8GB of space and therefore a lot of disks. Hard drives are cheap but if you are using a single external USB2 drive for backups then you are not much safer. USB2 is also excruciatingly slow and even with Firewire 800 you are looking at not much better transfer times.

Things that do not work well

Time for a quick summary to see what’s not working so far:

• External USB or Firewire hard drives
  Because it’s slow as well as unsafe to store data on a single (cheap) hard drive.
• DVD disks
  Too many disks required to backup to. Professional grade archive quality disks are expensive too!
• Cloud storage providers
  Too slow and too expensive for huge amounts of data required to be stored!

Find out how I do it on the next page… .

The same question is coming up with regular persistence on various camera forums: What bag for the EX3 (or similar)? Oh and it needs to fit carry-on luggage sizes.

You don’t want to end up having to hold your camera on your lap for a long haul flight or even a short one. Nor do you want to carry various bags with you from location to location. Travel light if at all possible!

There are many options out there, the one I chose may not be the right for you!

The way I fly

When I travel I want one bag to chuck everything into: charger(s), batteries, mic(s), cables, media, light, my 17″ laptop and last but not least the beast itself – my Sony EX3. Not a tall order at all then.

One bag? I was lying! There’s a lighting kit bag (3 lights), my tripod bag and a bag for my cloths and everything else I might need. The latter one is usually where I make stark choices: how much underwear do I really need for a weeks shooting? Can I make do with one pair of trousers and one pair of shoes?

Thankfully I don’t often have to lug around lights, so the damage is limited to one backpack, the tripod bag (which you can also take on the plane with you!) and my check-in trolley case for everything else.

There’s a well known size for carry-on luggage but not all airlines go by that standard. What it comes down to is what the staff tell you can go on or has to be checked in. Generally if you are flying from UK, if you can demonstrate that it’ll fit into their carry-on luggage frame at check-in you are golden. Sometimes you can cheat by taking stuff out, putting it into a plastic bag and then put it back in after. However, as with most things flying you are at several peoples mercy. From security staff who freak when they see your wireless mic adapter to check-in desk staff under strict orders to be as much as a pain as possible.

I show up with my bags and usually try to be as nice as possible. A bit of charm goes a long way! Especially with security staff who can get quite excited when you are trying to take so much electronics on board an aircraft.

The bag I chose is the Petrol Cocoon or PCBP-3N as Petrol call it. It’s a very comfy backpack, which weight you can barely notice even when loaded to the brim and lugged around all day! Yes, you will feel it after you take it off and have lunch.

When shooting I like to use a smaller rucksack instead but it depends on the situation.

The Petrol Cocoon will snugly fit your EX3 or EX1 or other camera of similar size. And it will do so safely!

I hope you found my little post helpful. What choices have you made? What is your experience flying with kit? I like to hear from you.

Petrol Cocoon PCBP-3N with Sony EX3 camera

Hand baggage Sizes and Comparison

British Airways Carry-on hand luggage specifications:
56cm x 45cm x 25cm (22in x 18in x 10in)
Petrol Cocoon PCBP-3N specifications:
61cm x 40cm x 32cm (24in x 16in x 12.5in)

The important bit!

As you can see the bag exceeds the regulation size for hand baggage that you can carry-on a plane! However, don’t forget that it is a bag and not a suitcase – you can shove it in to the frame easily enough. Just be careful not to be too forceful and take out anything you don’t need to carry on-board! Chargers, batteries, … you only want to keep the EX3 and the laptop safe. Good luck and try to remain calm when staff advise you that the bag is too big. Show them that it fits and how light it is.

PS: I got my gear from Prokit in London. All professionals, most of the kit is on display for you to try and they make a nice cup of tea while you wait to process your credit card. Say hi to Mark from me if you see or call them

1. Go to your itunes store on PC/Mac and go to the user account (top right hand corner – usually your email address)
   
2. Enter your account password when prompted
   
3. Next thing you see is your account overview. From here we’ll select “Edit Payment Information” (second from top right)
   
4. You’ll notice a message in red at the top of this page. In my screenshot you will not see anything other than a normal screen though.
   
5. Scroll to the bottom and press “Done”.
   
6. You are back at the account overview. Press “Done” once more to exit.
   
7. Now reboot your Apple TV (don’t do “Standby”) – unplug the power cable and plug it back in again.
8. Now try logging on to your iTunes account on the Apple TV again and purchase something!

This worked for my client and I hope it will work for you too. Let me know.

Enter the Amahi Home Server – a free, Open Source alternative to WHS.

The Amahi team have pooled the best of what the Open Source Software community has to offer and wrapped it up in an easy to install, configure and maintain package. I don’t know why it is available freely as no doubt a lot of time has been invested developing it. It puts other paid efforts to shame in my opinion.

The cornerstone of Amahi Home Server for me is the sleek integration of Greyhole, which is the Open Source counterpart to Microsoft’s WHS Folder Duplication. Instead of RAID it forms a very fast, reliable and more over efficient way to keep your data save by copying it (mirroring) across available hard drives, which can be of any size and flavour (i.e. USB mixed with internal SATA drives can form a pool).

I now have a DHCP, VPN, (redundant) file server, IRC proxy, UPNP media server, and bit torrent client all in one easy to manage package.

Thank you to the Amahi team for providing a well supported, documented and developed solution.

My set-up: Asus P5B-Plus motherboard with Intel Core2Duo CPU, 4GB DDR2 RAM, 4x 1.5TB Samsung F3 hard drives (storage pool), 2x 250GB Samsung SpinPoint hard drives (RAID1; operating system)

A further 4x 1TB hard drives will be moved from the Drobo to the new server soon.

Related: http://www.amahi.org/features/testimonials

All links and prices as of 26 July 2010 and provided by www.overclockers.co.uk; Prices exclusive of VAT and shipping; I am not affiliated with Overclockers UK and nor receive remuneration for referring readers to their website.

CPU

First, we need to determine a suitable processor and the only one that currently offers the best performance at an affordable price is the Intel i7 930 2.8Ghz CPU.

Cost: £184.99 excl.

In case you wonder, the next one up from the 930 is the 960 which currently runs you a cool £385.52 exclusive of VAT. Alternatively you could go with Xeon but I find the i7 gives me better all-round performance.

Motherboard

The motherboard (mainboard) needs to not only give me room to upgrade to a faster processor but also provide the bulk of features my new workhorse needs. We want SATA3 which offers us a staggering 6Gbit/s of bandwidth to connect our hard drives with. We also need a decent sound card and room for at least three PCIe x16 cards for expansion. Since we also need fast external storage connected to our rig, we should look for brand new and super fast USB3 ports.

I have picked the Asus P6X58D-E which offers us everything that we need and more. 2x SATA3, 2x USB3 ports, 3x PCIe 16, support for tripple channel RAM with up to 1600mhz. It also has 6x SATA2 ports (RAID0,1,5,10) and 8x USB2 ports.

Cost: £127.65

Main System Hard Drive

Speaking of speed, I really love my Crucial C300 256GB SSD drive in the Sony Vaio workstation laptop but for the desktop a smaller version will suffice as we can add another drive for our work files. So the C300 64GB 2.5″ SSD SATA3 drive it is

In case you wonder, it is one of the fastest drives out there and combined with the 6Gbit/s interface… it just flies! You wouldn’t want it for your work files though. We are simply going to use it for Windows 7 and our apps. If you really wanted more space and performance (who could resist?), just add two of these puppies and you’ll be breaking every sensible speed barrier.

Cost: £99.99

Work Files Hard Drive

The drive to pick to do work on needs to be big but also damn fast. Since we only have 2x SATA3 ports we have to make a choice as to whether we can afford to add a SATA3 PCIe adapter card and more SSD drives but reduce the usable space (unless you have a _big_ budget) or get both sufficient speeds and more than enough space for several HD video projects to work on at the same time.

We will go the tried and tested route with two Samsung SpinPoint F3 1TB drives, providing us with around 270MB/sec sustained write speeds in RAID0 (striped).

Cost: £41.27 x2 (£82.54)

Just for fun: Samsung F3 RAID 0 benchmarks and a comparison with a Corsair Nova 32GB SSD (not even that fast an SSD when compared with a C300 I might add). A review and benchmarks for the C300 can be found at www.benchmarkreviews.com.

Memory

Hard drive speed is meaningless if your workstation cannot serve data to the processor quickly. Thanks to triple channel DDR3 running at 1600mhz that shouldn’t be a problem. However, we want loads of it so we might need to compromise again as that type of RAM is very dear.

OCZ Gold LV 6GB (3x 2GB) memory can be had for £136.16 and provides us with an excuse to buy two sets for just a little under £300 excluding VAT. Considering that RAM is probably the most important component apart we need, it is money well invested.

Cost: £136.16 per 6GB set (x2 £272.32)

Graphics Card

If you are working in graphics or video you need to look at the right graphics card for your editing workstation. Back in the good old days it was easy: just pick whatever model Nvidia Quadro FX you could afford.

Nowadays, especially with CS5′s CUDA support, any of the new graphics cards will do nicely and allow you to relax with a good game at a fantastic resolution

My choice is the Nvidia GeForce GTX 460 with 1GB vRAM and factory overclocked. Hardware support is build-in to support the latest video codecs and provide smooth scrubbing as well as prompt rendering.

Cost: £179.99

Power Supply

Our new workstation is nearly complete now. Just time to finish it off by picking the last vital component: the power supply. Choose the wrong one and your system won’t even boot. Or it will crash a lot.

Make mine a Corsair TX750W ATX and rest assured to have enough grunt even for two graphics cards (SLI) and another big, fast hard drive.

Cost: £89.35

CPU Cooler

Since noise is a major concern, especially when editing videos or trying to concentrate while removing spots and red-eyes in Lightroom, I have selected a Corsair H50-1 high performance CPU watercooler to help run the i7 CPU quietly. This is a pre-build cooler and only needs attaching to the CPU. It’s self-contained so you don’t need to worry about maintaining it either.

Cost: £51.05

eSATA

Lastly, I need something to hook up my eSATA RAID1 workbench that I use to offload and edit on-location as well as my BluRay writer which uses eSATA too. And my backup hard drives… . Since I have more than enough ports on the motherboard, all I need is a LianLi BZ-U05B USB2 and eSATA 5.25″ converter which fits into a spare drive slot in my case. It’s a nice, unobtrusive black to match the case and combined USB/eSATA ports.

For good measure I will get an Akasa SATA to eSATA adapter for the rear of the case, to which my BluRay writer will mostly likely remain connected permanently.

Monitor

Although I already own a very nice Dell 24″ LCD monitor – the 2407WFP-HC – I cannot help but noticing that it is a very crowed workspace! Even at 1920x1200px resolution I can barely write this article without gasping for air

Suffice to say that it is barely a suitable size for editing 1080HD videos, hence my eyes and heart are set on the bigger brother – Dell’s excellent 3008WFP with a screen resolution of 2560x1600px. More than enough room for previewing a clip in its proper resolution and yet have space for various bits like a time line or bins! And I can always use the 24″ for further palettes.

Summing Up

Before you ask, I already have a suitable Sharkoon Rebel 9 case which I intend to use for this system. The grand total of the above parts will run to £2,059.24 exclusive of VAT (plus £16.85 shipping). That’s for one heck of a fast system and includes a brand new 30″ monitor! Not bad for just over £2,000 (excl).

Of course, I do already own software and have a big bad NAS on which I store my media, as well as a fantastic BluRay writer with which to back them up. If you were to add a case, NAS and BluRay you would be just short of £3,000 (excl) depending on how big a data store you want to have.

Mine is running on a Linux box with 4x 1.5TB drives and there’s another with 4x 1TB drives = gross total of 10TB. I don’t use RAID, I use simple, fast duplication so I get the most from it too and it creates redundant copies

Enough of the geekery already. Time to flex the plastic and take a deep breath…

• Client: Specialised Homes Ltd
• Type: Medium Sized Enterprise
• Industry: Property Development

Specialised Homes is a property developer of luxurious, high-end homes in Surrey, specialising in providing a true full-service to their clients.

The task was to create a new website to help promote the comprehensive range services offered and generate new sales enquiries for their business. Following the recently redeveloped brand identity, I designed an easy to use yet sophisticated looking website.

The website is optimised for a specific range of matching keyword phrases to make sure the correct pages are displayed for people looking for not only their core services but also secondary and tertiary.

Text is kept concise and is written to not only capture visiting Search Engines but help human visitors find the right information while skimming through the pages.

Synopsis: Manufacturing in the UK unfairly gets bad press. Despite reports of its imminent demise, Britain remains the world’s 6th largest manufacturer. Output reached an all time high in 2007, although right now the sector is suffering from the downturn. To take the temperature of industry in the UK we went to the midland town of Derby, which hosts a surprising range of companies producing goods for both domestic and export markets.

• Client: FBC Media
• Channel: CNBC (Media Info)
• First Broadcast: 18/06/2010
• Website: CNBC World Business
• Producer: Diana Muriel
• Camera: Axel Segebrecht
• Category: Business & Financial News