An interesting situation cropped up a few days ago. Regulars may remember that I now shoot tapeless with an EX1, which has been a beautiful thing for my market niche.

So, a couple of very simple setups in a day: shoot an operations control room, interview a couple of people, maximum 2 mins of edited material. Then zoom off into town, intervew a few people at a conference. Maximum 1 minute of edited material.

So, 80 minutes of SxS card space should, in theory, be plenty. As I’d be travelling by public transport, I could lose 3 Kg of computer equipment by leaving it at home. Big mistake.

The lovely thing about tapeless is that when shots don’t work, you can delete them. The side note is that you need to start and stop between takes, otherwise it’s hard to chop things out, and with interviewees that have been ‘volunteered’ by their boss, and really unwilling to do any more than the bare minimum, there’s no real chance to fiddle with clips.

So the inevitable happened. The first shoot consumed 45 minutes, even with the occasional delete. The second shoot looming, I could sit on the train and manage my clips to get rid of 15 mins of dross, but with the risk of mucking things up, or I could split the journey and pop home to unload the cards. Which I did.

Okay, so I always knew this was an option, and would have bought the laptop if the option hadn’t been there, but it’s taught me a lesson, which will cost me £800: you need double the capacity of your planned maximum utilisation.

That goes for hard disks too. And power strips, come to think of it. Teabags. Edit days. Toddler clothes. Hmmm. A pretty universal thing, then.

PS: How come a train ticket from A to B, and from B to C, costs less than A to C?