This video is part of a series that go along with this micro doc; really just an interview that I shot of a buddy of mine who just opened a new bar-cafe here in town. And this video is specifically to talk about storage; the storage that we used and the storage that we needed to shoot this doc on the GH7 in ProRes RAW. Now this video is sponsored by OWC. They were the primary sponsors of this project. And the reason they're sponsoring this is because I reached out to them after I first started using the GH7 and found that their media was the only media that I owned that could support the speeds of the ProRes RAW footage, again recording internally on the GH7. Now shooting ProRes RAW internally is an absolutely amazing thing that we have on the GH7, but you do have to have the media to support it. And the cards that worked were the OWC Ultras, the Atlas Ultra, and in this case, the 2 terabyte card. Now these things are insane. Take a look at this by the numbers here. You can see that these are 3650 megabyte read speeds with 3000 megabyte per second write speeds. These things are nuts. And again, as I said, these are the only cards that I owned that would actually support the write speeds of the camera. So this card on its own will allow you to record to it. But this isn't the entire story. And part of what OWC sent over when I asked them to sponsor this was a whole collection of kit that goes along with this; kind of the entire ecosystem. So we're going to go through all the pieces. Obviously, you need the fast media. But if you only have fast media and you don't have a fast reader, then you're going to be spending a lot of time copying the files off of that storage card. Now to be fair, you are going to have to get a card reader if you're shooting to CFExpress Type B. Your laptop doesn't have that capability built into it. So you're going to need a reader. And this reader right here from OWC is the USB 4 – that's 40 gigabits per second – CFexpress Type B card reader. Now from there, you're going to copy to whatever drive you have or to the internal drive on your computer. If you've got a slow external drive, then that of course is going to be your next bottleneck. And if you're recording internally, then that should give you the fastest performance possible, right? Well, that's actually what I thought, but I was extremely surprised to find that that was not the case. This drive right here is the 1M2 enclosure. This is available from one to eight terabyte sizes. This also is USB Type 4, 40 gigabits per second. And I'm going to cut in some behind the scenes shots of me offloading footage on set so you can see this in actual action. But this thing is incredibly fast as well. Now I was surprised to find out just by testing that it's actually faster to copy from this memory card to this drive than it is to copy from the memory card to the internal storage. Let's take a look at the copy shots that I got from the set. We're shooting this whole documentary on OWC media, and we're using not only their cards, but their card readers and the drives. And these cards are insanely fast. First of all, this card can handle the massive data rate of the ProRes RAW footage. But I have on here a 40 gigabit per second reader, along with a 40 gigabit per second hard drive. And when you pair these things together, the data transfer speeds are absolutely insane. I'm using this software called Offshoot to do the transfers. It's incredibly efficient. I just insert my card. Everything's already preset. One button to start the transfer and the transfer speeds are off the hook. This is transferring at 2.6 gigabytes per second. The entire data transfer of this 100 gigabytes, is gonna be incredibly quick. Almost done, almost done. There it is for a total transfer time of only 37.1 seconds for 98 gigabytes copying from this CFexpress OWC card to this OWC Express 1M2. Both 40 gigabit per second, incredibly fast drives. So how much data are we actually talking about here? Well, let me give you some numbers here. So first of all, we are once again talking about shooting ProRes RAW. Not the HQ, I'm not crazy, I just went ProRes RAW. But ProRes RAW, first of all, the files themselves, the dimensions, this is 5.7K RAW. This is 5728 by 3024 pixels at 2.3 gigabits per second. Now in reality, it actually turned out to be a bit less than 2.3 gigs second. I think that's kind of a max. It was usually just under two was about the average. But what that equates to is 12 and a half gigabytes per minute of footage. So for every minute you shoot, that's 12 and a half gigs. And we had 300 gigs from this interview and the B-roll. Excessive? Maybe! More than we needed for this shoot? Certainly, but of course, it's all about the tech at this point. I'm showing off what we can do with ProRes RAW and what it takes to record and then edit from that. Speaking of editing, of course, if you are going to be editing from this external drive, this is obviously plenty fast to be shooting ProRes RAW and editing multi-stream from that. And we'll talk a little bit more about that in a little bit here. So recording to the CFexpress Type B is not the only option that you have. These are not cheap. They are expensive cards. So you do have a slightly lower cost way to do this as well. So let's just talk about prices real quick since we're here. This 2TB card comes in at $680. The 1TB version is $350. Now you are again going to also need a reader to go with that. So the OWC USB 4 reader for that is $100. If you're going to add the 1M2 drive to your setup as well, then these range from 1TB to 8TB from $250 to $1400 depending on of course the size that you need. And you can buy it as an enclosure and add your own NVMe storage to it if you like. So that's that solution. But what about shooting over USB to an external drive? Well, that's an option as well. You don't have to shoot ProRes RAW to the CFexpress Type B card. You can also shoot to a USB drive. And this right here is the OWC Elektron. This little guy here is going to give you the performance that you need to shoot external USB to this drive. Now we didn't do this for this shoot because part of this project was also working with the new Atomos Shinobi. And the Atomos Shinobi II is able to control the camera over USB connection. Well, the camera only has one USB port, so that means that that port was tied up for the Shinobi, which means that I needed to shoot internally. But you can actually shoot ProRes RAW to one of these and save yourself a bit of money if that's the road you want to go. So let me reconfigure this camera to hold this and we'll be right back. Now I've got the GH7 reconfigured, taken it out of the cage. All we have on here now is the OWC Elektron for external storage. And you can see that I've got this rigged up in here using a Kondor Blue SSD holder. This is the Universal SSD holder. It's just not custom built for this drive. It's just universal model. And you also see in here the way I've got it mounted. It's actually upside down, which may seem a little bit funny. But if we look at it from the side, and I go ahead and pull the drive out, you'll see that the cage and the SSD drive have a very, very similar shape. I can actually mount it this way. That'll work. This just has to expand out bigger and it will fit that way. But this is such a nice, perfect compact fit that I like working with it like this. If we look at it from the top, you'll see that the USB cable here is being held locked into place by this little gripper here. And that is solid in there, meaning that when I slide this thing in, it stays put and then I can lock it down and now it's not going anywhere. And of course, when I'm ready to stop shooting and start editing, I can just pull that thing off and off we go. Now one of the advantages of shooting to an SSD is that you don't actually have to copy the files off of it. You can just connect this directly to your computer and start editing. Personally, I don't recommend that. I'm not a fan of working that way. I think that it's safest to copy the files off. Otherwise this is literally your only copy and if something happened and you over-write a file, deleted it, whatever accidentally, you'd be out of luck. So I don't recommend working that way, but I know a lot of people do like to work like that. So you do have that as an option. Now, the size of these range from 480 gigabytes up to 4 terabytes. The 2 terabyte version, so matching the same size as the little CFXpress Type B card that I had here is $300. So it is less than half the price of this drive. So if cost is a consideration, of course, then this could be a great option to consider as well. This little drive here has another really cool feature to it. It is actually crush-proof. I've seen videos of people driving their trucks over it, but it's also IP67 rated waterproof. So if this does get wet, gets rained on, gets dropped, whatever, it is going to be just fine. Now I've just dropped this in here. Let's go ahead and just prove that this works. Now I know it's not exactly the greatest test. It hasn't been in there for a really long time, but let's dry that thing off. No sleight of hand. I'm not trading it out with another one. And probably should make sure we get the water out of there. And let's just plug it into my computer. I'm going to start recording the screen on here so we can see what's happening. And let's plug this guy in. And of course, it mounts right up. There is the drive. And from there, we can see there's our footage. go. So there you go; another option for recording ProRes RAW with the GH7 or of course any camera that takes a USB recorder. Now there's another little drive on here that we want to look at; another OWC Envoy. This one is even smaller than the Elektron that we were just looking at. It is a teeny tiny little drive, very, very compact, very lightweight. This one is not rated to be shooting on the GH7 with, however, what this can be used for is recording from an iPhone. It's a USB-C, so if you've got an iPhone 15, you want to shoot directly to a drive, this is a great option for that. It is considerably smaller and even a little bit lighter weight than this drive here. So of course, on an iPhone setup, this is ideal. The cool thing about working with one of these is if you are shooting on an iPhone, you can then go ahead and plug this directly into your iPad to edit from. So let's go ahead and fire that thing up. I've got Final Cut running on this iPad Pro. I'll go ahead and steal this cable, plug this guy into here. Now, I already copied some of the files from the GH7 that we shot earlier onto this drive just to use as a demo here. So let me go ahead and open up this project that is currently sitting on this external drive. And, with this project open, what we're going to see here is I've built a multistream playback. So what we're going to see here is four streams of video playing back simultaneously. This is four streams of ProRes RAW, 5.7K ProRes RAW, playing back simultaneously from this drive through Final Cut Pro in its native ProRes RAW format on this iPad Pro. So the performance of this is fantastic. You've definitely got enough performance on here to write to from your iPhone and of course to edit from directly on an iPad or on an iPhone, which is a pretty cool solution in here. There's one more thing I want to talk about and that is software from OWC called Innergize. Innergize is an app that is designed to basically maintain your memory, your external memory. So this will allow you to sanitize it, make it completely clean, bringing it back to factory settings. It'll allow you to run tests on it and it will allow you to update the firmware on the card. So let's take a quick look at that next. To run the Innergize app, you do need to have the OWC reader along with of course the OWC media. The CFXPress Type B media reader actually has a little switch on the back here switches it from standard USB copying mode over to Innergize mode. And when you put that on, now I can access this media inside the Innergize app. So let's go ahead and plug this thing in and insert our media and fire up the Innergize app. There's the card on here. If there was a firmware update available, it would be showing right here. I'm going to show you a little B roll that I recorded earlier of what that update process looks like. It's really straightforward. It just tells you that there's an update available; you click it and it runs the update. You also have a Health Check capability and the Sanitize capability, which is going to completely wipe out that drive, again, restoring it to factory settings. This is going to work with many of the OWC cards, the Ultra cards, of course it will, both the SD and the CFXPress Type B. You can check on their website to see exactly which cards this works with. But that piece of software is a really useful thing to have to make sure that your cards are always running at their optimum to test them and of course to sanitize them to make them completely clean between shoots. That's everything I wanted to show you from OWC. As you can see, they've got a lot of really great hardware here and the fact that it works so well with the GH7 shooting ProRes RAW is a beautiful thing. Like I said, I reached out to them in the beginning because their cards were the only ones that were working with the GH7 when it first came out and that made me very, very happy indeed to be able to shoot ProRes RAW internally on the GH7 is fantastic, but you need the media to do it. There's a couple more videos in this series. If you haven't seen them, there is the one on the Atomos Shinobi II and the one that's coming up after this is about editing that ProRes RAW footage using DaVinci Resolve, which doesn't do ProRes RAW. So we'll talk about that then.
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