Thursday, February 23, 2017

BIG SD CARD BUY

Bought som more storage SD cards for the BMPCC bodies. The cards need to be super fast to keep up with the RAW data pouring in to them. The card that is recommended is the 64GB Extreme PRO SD SDXC Card 95MB/s Class 10. Last month I picked up 3 refurbished versions of these cards for $20 USD a piece plus shipping. After testing the cards in my cameras I found they were NOT dropping frames so today I bought another 4.

I now have 11 of these cards, 4 I got from the seller of my cameras off eBay, and 7 are these refurbished babies (guaranteed to be as good as new).

I was thinking of buying the 128GB version in fact I bought one online but the seller disappeared without sending me the card. I appealed to eBay who refunded my $41 USD (too good a deal to be true and it was). I rechecked the prices for the 129GB cards tonight and found them quite high. I am also not sure if the 128GB cards work in the BMPCC. Decided to play it safe and buy the smaller sized 64GB versions.

64GB is quite small for the amount of info I am recording. I will need to change cards quite often. If you are shooting RAW, I think each card will only old 20-25 minutes of footage. With 11 cards I should have enough storage space to record 3 hours and 40 minutes per day.

Hmm wonder if I should buy a few more cards?

Here is the eBay pricing for different versions of this SD card (I paid $20 USD each for my refurbished type cards)

NEW 95MB/S 64GB SanDisk Extreme Pro SDXC Class 10 - $40.80 USD free shipping
NEW 95MB/S 128GB SanDisk Extreme Pro SDXC Class 10 - $66.55 USD plus $2.29 shipping

Update: Bought another 5 cards. Thought I needed them just in case they break down, in case I lose them, in case I need them for a long days shooting, etc. I now have 16 cards, which is enough storage space to do 5 hours 20 minutes+ of video a day. Do not plan on doing that much recording but it is better to have backups to my backups than to be stranded and pissed off in Mae Sot trying to buy SD cards (very limited stores). I would also hate to have an important shooting day cut short because I ran out of storage space. I have run out of still film before and that always hurts! There will be times I plan on spending the night in the dump filming. When I am there all night I want to make sure I can film at will.

I will now shoot at ease, trying to get the good and important video I need for the movie. I still have to becareful I do not overshoot and be selective. Everything I shoot will have to eventually be stored on hard drives for later editing.  I can only buy so many 4TB hard drives for storage! 

Note* If I shoot in ProRes HQ instead of RAW I can store much more footage on a 64GB card, I think it is 40 minutes plus. Not sure of the exact numbers, depends on frame rates etc ...24 per second 30? Am still learning. Having too many cards is certainly better than not having enough! 16 should do me nicely.