Here at eTeknix we work with all sorts of media; from the images we use in our written reviews like the one you are reading now, to large raw video footage for use in our YouTube channel. It’s safe to say that we appreciate storage more than the average person. In our office we have a large variety of storage options, but the most convenient is always going to be a mix of speed, capacity, and it’s physical size.
We use a variety of types of storage at the office, we use everything from SD cards to external SSDs, and for anything that doesn’t need to have as fast of a speed, we have our NAS where we store resources and old footage. When it comes to external SSDs, we use these all the time with our 12K camera for videos, this is for the speed. When you don’t have to worry about the speed of the storage, then you don’t end up waiting on the storage to catch up.
Big Things Come In Small Packages
What we have today is easily the smallest 1TB I’ve ever held, I had thought that M.2 Drives were small, but this takes the biscuit. Whilst an M.2 has a speed advantage over the CFexpress format of this card, the CFexpress has the benefit of size, this form factor allows for a much wider set of uses. The way we will be using this card day to day is with our 12K camera. This much storage is a necessity when working with footage that kind of size.
Let’s put this all into a bit of context for you, because without experience with this kind of hardware, you may not know just how fast we can fill up storage devices. We film at 12K on our camera to allow ourselves some room in editing to make zooms and edits without losing quality. At the 12K resolution, we film in 30 frames per second, at a 12:1 compression ratio in a 16:9 aspect ratio. What does all this mean for our storage? Well, with all of this in consideration, we are estimated to be able to get a minimum of an hour of footage on a terabyte of storage. So it’s safe to say that easy storage at high capacities makes all the difference for us.
This is all well and good, but if the card doesn’t actually perform well, then what is the point? That’s what I’m for. I don’t do any filming or editing, I do testing and writing. So to evaluate if these cards are worth it to us, I need to first see what kind of experience we can expect from these cards.
