Monday, June 13, 2011

The promised land of tapeless acquisition


Life was supposed to be all good once tape was abolished and we were all going to the promised land of tapeless acquisition. Well, the acquisition part is mostly good and I'm glad I never have to think about buying tape or worry about running out of tape in the last ten minutes of a theatre registration...

But the convenience of handing over a tape at the end of a shoot and writing an invoice is also history. Because handing over your flash memory cards is a no-no unless you can make a copy at the spot. Which means dragging a laptop and a harddrive to the set, make extra time to copy all the files, hand over the drive to the client and hope you get it back. Not very practical.
My last job I chose to send the files to my clients' server. Upload speed was 50 Kb/s so I was 'lucky' it was only 10GB in files. After 50 hours the upload was finished. My client can't see my work because he needs to send it to his editor to import it into a NLE-system first.
I love tapeless acquisition. It's just that life was a lot easier when I could just hand a tape over to my client.

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