Bredo / Guides / A one-person offload workflow

A one-person SD card offload workflow

Get every card onto at least two physical disks, check each copy against the card, name the shoot, and put the card away without formatting it. That is the whole job, it takes about forty minutes of mostly waiting, and it is the only part of the day that cannot be redone tomorrow. Everything else, the selects and the notes and the tidy-up, can wait.

The kit that makes this quick

A solo offload lives or dies on the hardware between the card and the drive. A dedicated card reader plugged straight into the Mac will beat a camera on a USB cable every time, both for speed and for not dropping halfway through while the camera's battery gives out. Buy the reader that matches your fastest card, and carry a spare cable, because cables fail more often than anything else in the bag.

For drives, one fast SSD you edit from plus one cheaper drive that receives the second copy covers most work. Bus-powered drives are convenient and are also the ones that get knocked off a table by a cable, so put them somewhere that a snagged lead cannot reach.

The offload routine, in order

1. Swap the card out and mark it as shot. A card that comes out of the camera goes back in the case the wrong way round, or in the pocket marked full. A shot card never shares a pocket with empty ones.
2. Plug the card in through a reader. Not through the camera, and not through a hub shared with a bus-powered drive.
3. Copy the whole card to the working drive. The entire folder structure goes into a dated shoot folder, with each card in its own subfolder so two cameras writing C0001.MP4 cannot collide.
4. Copy to a second, separate physical disk. Not another partition, not another folder. Two copies on one drive is one copy.
5. Check every copy against the card. Compare checksums read back from every destinations against the card itself. How to check a card copy has the detail.
6. Name the shoot and put the card away unformatted. Type the folder name while you still remember the day, and leave the card alone until you need it again.

Start the copy before you do anything else

The copy is the long pole and it needs no attention, so start it the moment you sit down. While it runs, charge batteries, clear the bag, back up the audio recorder's card by hand, eat. A routine that asks you to sit and watch a progress bar is a routine you will skip on the third night of a long shoot, and the nights you skip it are the nights that go wrong.

This is also the argument for doing the offload at the location rather than at home. Footage on a card in a bag in a car is one copy in a moving vehicle. Twenty minutes in the corner of the venue while the gear is being packed turns it into two copies that are already checked.

When a card fills up mid-shoot

Sometimes you have no choice but to reuse a card during the day. If that happens, the rule is that a card is only erased once its footage has been copied twice and checked, and the erasing happens in the camera rather than on the Mac. Never format a card because you are in a hurry and it is probably fine.

If there is genuinely no time to check a copy before you need the card back, copy it twice to two drives and accept that you are trusting two unchecked copies rather than one. That is a worse position than checking, and a much better one than erasing after a single copy.

What to do the morning after

The next day, with coffee, do the part that needed judgement: mark the takes worth keeping, fix the shoot name into something you will recognise in five years, and note anything the edit will need to know. This is also when a third copy belongs, if the job warrants one, ideally on a drive that lives somewhere else.

Then check one thing before you move on: is any of yesterday's footage on only one disk? On a busy week that is how a gap appears, when the second copy was started and never finished. Organising footage on a Mac covers where all of this should land, and why the dated folder is worth the discipline.

Questions

How many SD cards should I carry so I never have to erase one on location?

Enough to shoot the whole job without reusing one, which for most solo work means two or three times the card capacity you expect to fill. Cards are the cheapest part of the kit and reformatting on location is where footage is lost, so buy the extra card rather than plan around erasing.

Can I offload to a laptop's internal drive and copy to externals later?

Only as one of the two copies, never as both. An internal drive is a single physical disk in a machine that gets dropped, stolen and stood on, so a copy there plus the card still in your pocket is the minimum, and a second external drive is better. Do not erase the card until two copies exist somewhere that is not the laptop alone.