5 Tips on Memory Cards | Transcription

Five tips on memory cards, we talked about this earlier. We covered things like making sure that you were buying reputable cards, we use Lexar and SanDisk and buying it from reputable places as well. If you purchase them in retail packaging, it helps because they’re sealed. Retail packaging, right? Don’t purchase them in the open easy kind of packaging because them it’s, well you never know what you’re getting.

What about speed, speed definitely helps. Yes, speed is huge, especially if you’re shooting fast action, if we’re shooting sports, if we’re shooting live action events. Whatever we’re doing, if we’re planning on shooting say raw, and we want to shoot 5, 6, 7 image per second for say 10 seconds, or whatever amount of period we want. Well, you need to get faster cards and this is one of the big factors that’s going to affect the overall cost of the card. I can tell that actually, I’m going to open up my little Think Tank here and I’m going to bust out a CF card and you’ll see right on there it says, this one is 60MB per second. This is a SanDisk extreme, this is rated for 60MB per second of write time.

This I have here is another extreme, this is a SanDisk SD card, this is a 32GB and this ones only 45, it’s a class 10 card 45MB per second. Okay, so what that basically means is that this one can write 45MB per second, this one is 60MB per second. If we’re shooting at a rate that’s creating more images than 60MB per second well, it’s going to basically cause an, it basically just backs up the buffer. There’s a delay, so once the buffer fills up it has to pause as it’s transferring images over to the memory card and you might miss some shots.

If you are shooting action events then what do they need to look for? A much faster rate, so maybe where are we at these days, 90? I mean you can get a pretty high, like 90, 100, 100+, I mean they have. Now that we’re able to do like ultra HD and stuff with these cameras, like 4K. They have HD cards that I think are approaching like 150+ but they get very, very expensive. That’s the only downside to it, so you kind of want to gauge exactly what you need it for.

Hold on Pye, this is another one of those, if the newest speed comes out don’t just jump on it because it’s there. Just make sure that you really do need it, if you’re not shooting at high speed and it’s really not holding you back, maybe it’s not time to upgrade yet because it can get expensive.

Absolutely and you know with memory cards often we get forced to upgrade this based on cameras, like cameras for the longest time were only CF. Now all these cameras are basically all SD will have the higher end pro cameras will be using both, CF plus SD cards. But, yes it’s not something that you need to just upgrade every single go around.

All right, so next I want to systematize the way that you shoot. Now I pull this out of the camera for a simple purpose, when I pull my cards out of the camera I do not just set them down. When I set them down like this, well what happens is it gets confusing, especially the whole labeling thing. You don’t know which one of these are filled up. Exactly, right, they all look identical and I don’t know what’s got images on it so it becomes a really big workflow hassle. Generally when I take an SD card directly out of the camera if I’ve shot on it, it goes into my, this is a Think Tank Pixel Pocket Rocket. Okay, this is a card wallet that pretty much everybody uses, so when I’ve shot on it, it goes in upside down. I put it with this little, and I number my cards too, so it goes upside down just like this into my slot that way I can see that it’s been used. Otherwise, if it hasn’t been used I just leave it right side up, so it just shows the extreme.

But let’s talk about labeling real quick, so you should label your cards, you should put your names on it because everybody’s cards look the same. You should probably number it to help you figure out what sequence you’re shooting at and you should date it with the day that you started.

Look at this, I have labels. Pye put his phone number on it, can you zoom in on this? For a good time, call me. I’m just kidding, if you find my cards call me. I really don’t have phone numbers on this. Okay we’re moving on to tape number 4, tip number 4. Put that away.

Tip number 4, what is tip number 4? Back up. Back up your memory cards, back them up always and generally what we do is when we get done with a shoot. I know you and your studio you do things similarly but I don’t know if it’s the exact same as what we’re doing. We take our memory cards, we dump them onto a local computer and then it goes onto a server which is, has redundant backups. Okay, before we clear the memory cards it’s backed up in three different locations in case, just in case. Right, and actually for our case one of them is on the Cloud, just in case.

So now tip number 5, what happens when something goes wrong with the cards? In case something goes wrong with your cards. Let’s say you pop a camera in or let’s just do this. I’m going to take that card that, I didn’t look that it was flipped upside down, I just took it, popped it into my camera and I went into the menu and I accidentally formatted it. Okay, well in that situation all is not lost, okay, generally when you format your memory card what happens is the camera just preps the file system. Okay, so it hasn’t actually cleared everything, it just is essentially preparing it to be written on. So long as you don’t start shooting again you can actually recover all the images, even if, let’s say you happen to throw your card in your washer and dryer and it goes around and goes in your pocket. Yes, generally you can still recover images, if the cards been damaged or so forth it can still typically at least a lot of the images can be recovered. What you want to do is go and get an image recovery software, generally the SanDisk ones I believe they come with their own. They have their Sandisk recovery program and so does Lexar. Lexar has their own, there’s actual professional applications that you can buy that do a better job of it. But generally the factory does a good job of recovering data, so if you format it or damage or anything does wrong, don’t throw the card out, try to recover it first. It is possible in many cases and particularly with CF cards.

CHAPTER 1: BASIC PHOTOGRAPHY CONCEPTS

CHAPTER 2: UNDERSTANDING EXPOSURE

CHAPTER 3: FROM AUTO MODES TO MANUAL

CHAPTER 4: SHARP IMAGES AND FOCUSING TECHNIQUES

Chapter 5: COMPOSITION, ARTISTRY, AND CREATING GREAT IMAGES

Chapter 6: LEARNING MORE ABOUT YOUR CAMERA

Chapter 7: BONUS

Total Course Run Time: 6H 30M 21S