

You’re handed a MacBook Air and two USB 3 SSD drives. The 1st AC tells you to go find quiet corner out of the way and set up. The tiny house is crammed with crew and a couple of stressed out producers. There’s no room anywhere, so you start checking closets. Within minutes you’re up and running in the kid’s bedroom closet. You stealth your way back to the shoot just as the first card is getting swapped from the Sony a7R II covering the job in 4K. They only rented two cards so, “ make it snappy.” The AC hands you a 64GB SDXC card and says to clone it to the edit drive and the back-up drive. This is one of those wildly scary weak-link moments in file-based media production. The product of an entire day’s worth of shooting exists on tiny plastic and silicon memory cards, small enough to swallow, until the data is safely backed up.
