Introduction

Since I picked up a camera for the first time, travelling has become the main driver for me to capture unique moments and places all over the world. After years of learning the basics and developing an own style of photography, my passion finally led into a career, which today is not only paying the bills but also allows me to work with some of the top international brands out there.

Of course though, running your own business comes with so much more in terms of responsibility, next to creating and delivering high-quality content. One of the most important things to not only stay reliable in this industry but also trustworthy to your clients, is having a bulletproof workflow for your digital media at hand.

You may ask yourself why is that? Well, I’m happy to explain this in more detail in this blog post.

When running a creative business of any kind, your digital content can be seen as your resources or in fact as your most valuable asset. In order to create a final delivery, you need those assets upfront but also keep them as protected as possible for the future. Furthermore, for us travelling creatives an opportunity literally can appear at any point in time. You might be in the middle of a trip in the mountains during a heavy downpour or working your way through the streets of a busy and stifling metropolis somewhere in Asia, when out of a sudden you get this email and a new job opportunity arises.

Of course, high performing laptops and internet connections make it somewhat easy to communicate independently, no matter your current whereabouts. But dealing with digital assets in today’s world means that you need the right gear, which not only needs to be portable and can store huge amounts of digital assets but also delivers the performance to eliminate any kind of bottleneck in your creative process. In other words, you need very secure mobile hard drives with high capacities, which will be reliable even under the toughest conditions while offering crazy transfer rates to deal with today’s large file sizes of high resolution footage and images. Pair this with a well thought through backup strategy and you will have no trouble to satisfy your clients while growing your business sustainably.

Therefore, I teamed up with Western Digital a few years ago and since then trust their products when it comes to my digital assets. Just recently they rebranded their premium G-Technology product line to SanDisk Professional and with this came brand new designs of some of their top of the line storage options for demanding content creators. Luckily, I was able to test them out right away, when leaving for a trip to Portugal.

So let’s have a closer look on how I use the SanDisk Professional mobile and desktop solutions within my end-to-end workflow, all the way from taking a photo to backing up my projects and creating final deliverables.

Shooting on location

Using the right type of gear in fact starts at the very first step of my workflow, while shooting on location. When it comes to storage in camera, I only trust SanDisk Extreme Pro cards and always make sure I have several of them with me. I switch them out occasionally during a shoot to spread the risk and avoid losing content in case of a technical failure or loss of a card. That being said, until today I didn’t have a single issue with one of their cards. I’ve been in many places on earth already, including the open sea, rain forests, deserts and other very demanding environments. And most of my cards have been through a lot actually, including a huge wave hitting my complete camera backpack while being on a long tail boat out in the middle of the ocean during a storm in Indonesia.

And guess what: These cards work fine till today and I still trust each of them to a very high degree. Also, I always make sure that I don’t format any of the cards until I’m at a safe place, like a hotel room or studio, where I can transfer the content to a mobile drive, but more to that in a second.

SanDisk Professional and Extreme Pro storage

Just recently, when being in Portugal, I was able to test out the brand new SanDisk Extreme Pro CFexpress cards and let me tell you, that SanDisk hit the ball out of the park with this new generation of storage media.

These cards are so fast that, when paired with my Canon 1D X Mark III, I can literally shoot 20fps burst of unlimited RAW files and up to 5.5K RAW footage full-frame in 60p 12-bit 4:2:2 internally right onto the CFexpress media.

Just think about the sheer amount of data which is written to these cards per second and the high quality of footage you receive in such a relatively small package. Basically, the SanDisk Extreme Pro CFexpress cards offer unbelievable read/write speeds of up to 1.700 MB/s, which makes it possible to capture broadcast / cinema level type of footage on a medium almost the seize of a coin.

Yes, these cards currently come at quite a high price point, but that will definitely change with more and more camera systems adopting to this new technology in the very near future. So far I’m truly impressed and definitely will adopt to a fully CFexpress based capturing workflow asap.

Editing and creating backups on the road

As mentioned above already, I don’t format any of my cards from a day of shooting until I find myself in a safe space, like i.e. a hotel room or studio, where I can transfer the footage onto a mobile drive. I actually have a split workflow here, as I use a super fast SSD as well as a traditional hard drive, which is slower but therefore offers tremendous capacity.

When in Portugal, I had the brand new SanDisk Professional G-DRIVE SSD as well as the SanDisk Professional G-DRIVE ArmorATD with me.

SanDisk Professional G-DRIVE SSD & G-DRIVE ArmorATD

The G-Drive SSD is a small and portable all-terrain SSD drive, wich has super fast transfer rates of up to 1050 MB/s via an USB 3.2 Gen 2 port. It’s very rugged as well, offering an IP67 water and dust resistance, up to 3 meters of drop protection as well as a 2000lb crush resistance.

Using a drive like this gives you the performance you need to natively edit 4K footage (or higher) wherever you are, while also keeping your most valuable digital assets protected against mother nature’s elements or human failure. Personally, I use this drive to quickly offload larger amounts of RAW images and 4K footage as well as to edit all of my video projects on native 4K & 5K timelines within DaVinci Resolve, while being on the road or working on assignment away from home. All of this comes in a very modern and high-quality design, having a size which fits in the palm of your hands.

SanDisk Professional G-DRIVE SSD in Madeira, Portugal

SanDisk Professional G-DRIVE SSD & ArmorATD in Madeira, Portugal

The G-DRIVE ArmorATD on the other hand, follows a traditional hard drive architecture, unlike a SSD like the G-Drive SSD, which offers higher transfer rates. Though the advantage of the ArmorATD is a much more attractive price-capacity ratio. The version that I own offers tremendous 5TB of space, while still having transfer rates of around 140 MB/s. That is plenty enough to store data and access complex file structures or to edit RAW files in Adobe Lightroom. Being an all-terrain drive as well, it is protected against bad weather & dust and comes with 1000lb crush resistance.

So why does it make sense to own such a traditional drive next to a fast SSD at all?

Well, the ArmorATD in fact is the perfect drive for creating a second backup of larger amounts of content or bringing along several other projects with you, while travelling or being on location. A week of shooting 4k footage for example results in crazy amounts of data, which needs to be backed up of course. Doing so purely on SSDs would result in much higher costs but also in more weight to carry. Furthermore, it happened to me several times already, that a client needed some footage of prior projects from several weeks ago and the high capacity ArmorATD is the perfect drive to make sure I can deliver those assets, wherever I currently might be. All of this allows me to not compromise the limited capacity of my SSD drives that I need to edit high demanding footage of ongoing projects.

Back at the office in Berlin

Of course, having a solid backup strategy for your digital assets means that you at least need 3 different copies of your content at any time. As a side note: One of these copies should always be stored away from your home or office, so that in case of a disaster (fire, theft, etc.) it can serve as a last instance of recovery. This either could be done by using a cloud service like CrashPlan or Dropbox but also by backing up content on mobile drives, such as the ArmorATD, that will be stored at a different physical place, like i.e. your friend’s house. And while this is a good thing to do to secure your most important assets , it isn’t suitable for working on your content in day-to-day life as a creator. Just think about the overhead you have with copying each of them and keeping track on which projects are stored on what drive and so on. Also, if one of them fails and you haven’t done a recent backup of your latest changes on it you most likely will loose them forever.

So to keep all the work I’ve ever created at a single secure place, which not only makes it easy to backup as fast as possible but also offers the performance I need for my daily workflow as a professional, I use a SanDisk Professional Shuttle 8.

SanDisk Professional Shuttle 8 drive bays

The SanDisk Professional Shuttle 8 is a 8-bay hardware RAID solution, which uses Ultrastar Enterprise-Class drives that total in up to 144TB of capacity. Let alone the tremendous space you get with this device, it also offers transfer rates of up to 2000MB/s. This is enough to work on multiple 8K or VR timelines natively and in real-time.

Furthermore, it offers Thunderbolt™ 3 (40 Gbit/s) und USB-C™ (10 Gbit/s) connections and you can daisy chain up to 5 additional devices via the ports on the back. It’s also very portable and the enclosure features a solid handle on top, which makes it easy to bring the Shuttle on location for more demanding projects.

All in all, the SanDisk Professional Shuttle 8 is a true workhorse which not only offers great data protection thanks to the hardware RAID but also delivers future-proof performance, which will be able to scale with your business as well as larger projects and commercial work requested by your clients.

Final thoughts

Alright guys, I truly hope you could take away some learnings with this one.

When it comes to stay relevant and efficient in the creative industry, you definitely have to make sure to implement a well thought-through workflow for your media management. It is important to take care of this the very first moment you press the shutter, by investing in reliable and fast media, like i.e. any of the SanDisk Extreme Pro cards.

Personally, I’m really excited with the possibilities offered by the new CFexpress cards. They allow me to record up to 4K 10-bit (and higher) internally right onto the cards. Not only is this totally mind-blowing to me but also it allows for a much more compact gear setup when travelling around the world, without compromising any of the high quality my clients and I are looking for.

Furthermore, having all-terrain mobile drives, like the SanDisk Professional G-DRIVE SSD and ArmorATD allow me to truly work from everywhere as a creative professional. A couple of years ago you needed to invest in expensive desktop gear in order to work on demanding, high-resolution footage and to me it is just so exciting that now all of this performance fits in the palm of your hands and actually is affordable for beginners and enthusiasts as well, without braking the bank. Not only does this open the door for more creatives out there to start living their dream but it also means that hardware is not getting in the way of your vision.

When it comes to bringing it all together, the SanDisk Professional Shuttle 8 is all I could ever ask for. Its hardware RAID makes sure that I’m protected against drive failure and the enormous capacity and transfer rates make the Shuttle a truly future-proof device, which will grow with my business and the requirements of my clients.

That’s it for today’s blog post about my creative workflow. Don’t hesitate to reach out in case you have any further questions and make sure to check out the further information below!

See you around,

Chris

Instagram

YouTube

Additional Information

SanDisk Professional

Instagram: @sandiskprofessional & @sandiskemea

My Creative Workflow with SanDisk Professional