Working in stock video footage industry is very harsh in many aspects. One of them is massive data consumption that could eat out your cards before even finishing your shooting project. Instead of buying terabytes of memory cards or fast SSD drives to storage your massive project it is better to invest in a small laptop computer for copying files to bigger cheaper hard drives. We call this long term investment!
Years ago we had a big problem shooting cDNG files on CompactFlash card with our Canon 5D Mark III. Because the 64GB card could only storage 12 minutes of high quality FullHD footage, we needed an alternative solution instead of buying more expensive CF memory cards. The answer to our problems was Asus Transformer T100TAM, which in that time was the cheapest and best travel tablet/laptop computer. It had USB3.0 connection, 500GB internal hard disk drive and very responsive Windows 8. We upgraded 500GB hard drive with faster 500GB SSD drive. Also buying few portable WD 2TB drives were cheaper than buying just one extra Toshiba 1066x 64GB CF card.
Stock Footage of Copying Progress Bar On Computer Screen 4K
We use Asus Transformer for few years now and it is still very much used for everything except editing our works. It can run a 32bit portable Adobe Photoshop for some easy image editing, but it can’t run any 64bit software because the operating system Windows is only 32bit. Today we don’t use CF cards for recording, so we needed a USB 3.0 hub to attach cameras SSD media and portable drives to copy files. But we also use computer for writing, browsing, tagging stock video footage and for teleprompting text. It just works and we are very happy with this investment. Battery life is great too, it never let us down when copying files on shooting sets. Screen is detachable and could be used as tablet too.
We are in 2017 today and newest similar travel laptop computers can probably run Adobe editing tools without any problems too. You’ll be able to make and edit stock footage anywhere you go.
