Thought I’d pass along something interesting that’s been happening more and more of late.  Several of my frugal independent producer clients (is there any other kind of indie?) have been sending me either a portable hard drive containing their program or a HDV or miniDV videotape to which they outputted. 

Usually the request is for my production team to transfer the program to create a master HDCAM or digibeta.  (Standards conversion is also often requested.) 

This is a great way for these clients to get their programs to a high end tape master without having to invest in a costly record deck themselves.

The portable drive allows those clients who want to maintain the highest quality in the transfer to do so. 

There are a variety of relatively inexpensive and small-sized drives available on the market today.  I recently bought a 500 gb Seagate for around $150.  http://tinyurl.com/2nh7a6  

The storage space of these portable drives now makes possible what was not feasible only a few years ago.  Today, clients can send me either a full Final Cut Pro or Adobe Premiere project, or an uncompressed Quicktime or .avi of the edited sequence.  

With careful packing, these drives are sturdy enough to be shipped via most any trackable service.

The HDV & miniDV tape route is another way to get a program from the editing program to a high end HD or SD master.  Almost everyone who is editing today has access to outputting from the computer via firewire to one of those formats.  Is this pristine?  Well, ok, going directly from the computer to the digibeta would be ideal, but if you don’t have the money for a HDCAM or dbeta deck, it’s a great alternative.

So within the past months, portable drives and HDV’s and miniDVs have been arriving on my desk from Texas, Florida, Maryland and California.  Just another example of the “flat world.” http://www.thomaslfriedman.com/worldisflat.htm  Hey, keep ‘em coming!

Your copmments are welcome below.

Contact me, David Ryan at dryan@videolabs.net   301-217-0000 x104

If you enjoyed this article, you might be interested in reading about the importance of unity gain: http://tinyurl.com/9l9xre

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