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David L. Hausen is the president of Surreel, an award-winning production company based in Los Angeles, New York, and Paris. He recently directed “Red Hot Chili Peppers: Untitled Documentary”, which was featured in AFI’s Music Documentary Series, and is currently working on “Keith Haring: For the Lower East Side Boys”- a documentary that focuses on the spirit of Mr. Haring’s work and how that spirit has continued through efforts to save one of his murals. He’s been a part of the film industry for almost 20 years. He has also produced and served as director of photography for numerous documentaries, live concert shoots, and music videos for bands and artists like Metallica, Stone Temple Pilots, Public Enemy, and Shania Twain. We spoke with David about the difference that LaCie products have made in his workflow. www.surreel.com | How do you pick the topics for your documentaries/videos? Sometimes we are commissioned to produce films for various artists, corporations or not-for-profits. Alternatively, we will pursue subjects, topics or issues that we are passionate about and feel a compelling story can be told. With documentary filmmaking vs. narrative many times the story unfolds while you are filming. It's not unusual to start making one film and in the production or editing process end up telling a very different story then the one you set out to.
How has LaCie made your life working/editing footage easier? On our first shoot with the Red Hot Chili Peppers, we used two brand new Panasonic HVX-200 cameras that record to P2 memory cards requiring downloads on set to hard drives. Frankly, I was anxious about a hard drive crash, but our workflow was just about perfect. We’d take a P2 card and import onto one of the PowerBooks through Final Cut Pro to verify and check footage, then we’d take the same card and copy the raw data through a PowerBook to the LaCie 500GB external drive. Within ten minutes of our last shot, everything—all 20 hours of footage—was transferred. Under our old system, that process would have taken a week. We walked off the set ready to edit, having dramatically accelerated our post process. |
With bicoastal offices, one of the challenges we face is exchanging large video files during the editing process. We use our LaCie drives to share edits through the Final Cut Pro project file via FTP—our LA and NY offices both use a LaCie d2 drive with duplicate footage. Each office accesses the same files so that we can simply exchange the project file over FTP and the corresponding file footage is available on our local drive. With this system we can open up, review, and pull selects in full HD anywhere in the world.
Most recently we started using the LaCie 4big Quadra on our Keith Haring project. To be honest, at first I was skeptical because our archival plans had always been based on purchasing the most economical drives we could find and performing complete backups onto two separate external drives. Having our material on multiple drives meant that if there were a drive failure we would still have our material in two other places. In a tapeless workflow, this would seem to be the only solution. The idea of purchasing a more expensive RAID system didn’t seem cost effective for us- however if you understand how RAID works, it’s easy to see why we incorporated this into our workflow.
With the RAID 5 setting on the 4big Quadra, we increased the number of drives we use for redundancy by one terabyte, and we increased our available capacity by 200%. Instead of having two 1TB drives backing up our terabyte of original material, the array uses four 1TB drives and only one of those terabytes is utilized in redundancy, giving you three terabytes for original material. The RAID system partitions part of each of the four drives in the unit to create the needed redundancy; and if any one of the drives in the Quadra fails we simply have to replace the failed drive and we will still have not lost any media.
How long have you used LaCie products?Since 1997, when we purchased external SCSI drives to use on our Avid edit system. Describe an experience with your LaCie drive where our product greatly improved your workflow. I recently wanted to transfer my father's files cross platform from a PC to a Mac. My attempt to get the machines to see each other across the network was proving too time consuming, so I plugged in my LaCie 500GB Little Disk portable into the PC, copied his files, then plugged it into the Mac to complete the migration. It’s nice to be reminded that LaCie doesn’t just provide solutions that can only be used in high-level, professional situations—even users on a very consumer level can benefit from backup and storage products. |
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