Media storage can be confusing. This guide should help you to optimize for performance, redundancy and security. When it comes to hard drives and storage, it’s easy to be overwhelmed. Mistakes can be costly when your data is at risk. I’ve compiled this guide to help you navigate the media storage landscape armed with some basic knowledge. This article will cover direct-attached external drives, desktop RAID arrays, and internal RAID arrays. I’m not touching on NAS or networking in this post. Duplicate Your Data! This should go without saying. Always duplicate your data onto at least two separate physical drives. This starts when offloading camera cards on set, and continues to the storage you are using for post-production. Project files are typically small and can easily be backed up, even to the cloud. Many other types of temporary files can be recreated, such as NLE cache files, and even transcoded media. It’s critically important that you always keep more than one copy of your original camera media. On Set Small bus-powered external SSD drives, or hard drives are often used on set to offload camera cards daily, and may then be used to shuttle camera media to larger storage or shared storage on or off-site. On larger productions, your DIT may also use much larger direct-attached RAID arrays on location. Whatever your particular data-wrangling workflow may be, it’s important to always maintain duplicates at every stage of the workflow. Ideally, one set of duplicated camera media should be kept off...
Published By: CineD - Friday, 15 May, 2020