I have to configure a system for offlining a low budget feature shooting on P2.  At the end of the offline the media will need to be transferred to a Symphony Nitris for online.

Can anyone with P2 experience point me in the right direction for suitable drives?  I'm guessing a minimum of 30 hours of material. So about 2TB?  

I guess we can use regular firewire / USB drives for backing up the media, but these won't be fast enough to edit from?

Any advice gratefully received.

regards

Brian

Just purchased for my newly upgraded Xpress to MC 3.0 a 2TB G-raid2 drive.  Thing is pretty fast via a Firewire 800 card and the best part is that the drive is purchased for around $800 US.  Ive never really bench tested it agains my other MCA that has SCSI drives, but it doesnt 'feel' much different speed wise (although I have only pushed 2 layers thru it).

Here's the link to the manufacturer, although you can buy it cheaper from an on line store.  They also have storage and performance charts on this website so you know how much storage you will need, and how many layers before a render.  For that price its a no brainer, even if you need to get two 2TB units.  They come formatted for the Mac but it takes less than five minutes with the instructions provided to format for the PC.

http://www.g-technology.com/products/G-RAID2.cfm

Best of luck.

Thanks, unfortunately not available in the UK at the moment.  No stock available from either of the importers.

regards

Brian

Two HDDs in RAID 0 connected via FW800 are capable of playing two streams of 175Mb/s 10bit in DNxHD. We use LaCie and Formac external RAIDs. DVCProHD has lesser datarate - 100Mb/s.

PP