File transfer for European Clients...ideas?

[Indrestudios]

Just recovered from recording a 3 day prog rock festival, and many of the bands expressed interest in purchasing their set as a ProTools session.

The hitch is that most of them have left town already, back to Germany, Sweden, etc. My first thought is to purchase USB or FW drives for the transfer, confirm they have a voltage agile powersupply, and ship 'em overseas. Each set is about 30+ gigs (gotta love Prog Rock).

Anyone have any better ideas? Files are just way too big for DVDRs or FTP.

-MC

[boojum]

The wall wart for these external devices is usually good from 90 to 250 volts. That about covers it. Your > 30GB external USB drive sounds the best solution to me: simple, cheap, and it works.

[Offbeatpocket]

An AIT-tape would be fine for that. Very reliable media (I´v been using AIT since it was introduced (I work for this Japanese S%&Y company ), and can only say good things about it). SONY e200-ULS, 80GB uncompressed on one tape. Maybe even an e100-ULS would do (40GB uncompressed). If you have a PC with SCSI, there are SDX500C or SDX700C.

Pro: small tape with small shipping fees even via airmail.
Con: your customers need a similar (or better) drive and the same backup software to get the data onto their HDs.

You could also use a 2.5" HD. There are empty trays available (50 € or so) for putting them in and connecting it via FW, USB, SATA.

Hope this helps a bit...

Andre

[Indrestudios]

Andre, Yes those AIT tapes are very cool. I have a friend here that uses them for archiving. There is something to be said for putting a tangible item on a shelf for storage.
That said, I'm guessing most of these artists probably won't have access to a machine for the restore.

I like the idea of using raw drives IDE or SATA maybe, and seeing if they can round up an enclosure on their end. I know they are all trying to keep their costs down, might save a bit on overseas shipping too.

[Shadow_7]

You could put the files into a zip file, and split the file to fit onto dvdr's. 10 of those and 43GB of data. It might take a little know how on the receiving end to put it all back together. But it's probably the cheapest in terms of available and acquired gear, plus shipping. Granted that it's not desireable in terms of simplicity. And burning time is quite a cumbersome thing with that much data.

Shipping a hard drive sounds the simplest. But IMO hard drives are frail(likely to break) when shipped. USB drives might come of age soon enough. I got an 8GB one for $40+tax a few weeks ago. Which would still require a file split, and at device x4 not really cheaper than the harddrive method.


Joining a split file isn't all that hard though.

copy file1/b+file2/b+file3/b fileout
(in DOS or DOS emulation)

cat file1 file2 file3 > fileout
(in *nix's)

Or pay $35 for a 3rd party tool to dumb it down even more.

creating the split file might be a little harder to do. Just use split in Linux. I don't know of a windows way to do that. I often have to split files, since my email is limited to 10MB per send. And I'm still on dialup.

Alternatively you could do the torrent route. Although if the client is on dialup, it might take a minimum of three months for the torrent of that size to finish downloading. Assuming a decent connection and dedicated downloading time. Probably the least desireable of all.

As I'm starting to see a new business potential for a Western Union of sorts for Terabit data transfers.

You might also find a middleman of sorts local to those groups. Send them a large drive with everyones stuff. And let him or her take care of the logistics.

I guess I have new love for my Korg MR-1000. Worst case scenario, it's a 40GB USB Storage device. Probably more when/if I get around to swapping the internal drive for a bigger one.

[d_fu]

Here's what I would do (from another thread)...

Daniel

[LX3]

My recommendation would be 2.5" "laptop" portable firewire drives. No powersupply to deal with, much smaller and lighter.

Although gigabyte for gigabyte, they're not as good value as 3.5" external drives, the cheapest 2.5" drive still tends to be cheaper than the cheapest 3.5" external.

At 30GB, you'll be burning discs for days if you use DVD-Rs!

If the cost of paying for an external HD makes the difference between the bands buying their audio and not buying their audio, it's probably best to steer clear of the whole affair. I've been stung like this before - usually, all bands love the idea of having the multitracks of their set... until they have to pay for them.

It might seem extreme, but these days, where there are acts supporting the artist I'm actually booked to record, I don't press record unless I have an agreement in advance with the artists concerned. It avoids a lot of grief. In one situation I even had a promoter demanding the multitracks from me, because they felt that the copyright in the recordings belonged to them, since they had "arranged" the show. I had them literally screaming down the phone at me for ten minutes! I had to hang up on the guy.

"No good deed goes unpunished" as they say.

[Indrestudios]

Good call on the "laptop" drives, they're pretty small and the shipping should be minimal.

For this gig, we were hired (and paid) for all three days by the promoter. His intention is to release a "best of" CD and I'm pretty sure he's secured all of the proper clearances from most of the bands involved. He's a very nice guy (sometimes an anomaly in his industry) he is charging the bands a very small fee if they'd like to get a copy of their multi-tracks. I think this helped them sign on to the compilation.

I agreed to facilitate the transfer, and help get the bands what they need as part of our fee.

[LX3]

Ah, that's not so bad then. Hope you had something in your budget for the cost of the drives and shipping.

[macula]

You can use 4 DL DVD's (around 8GB each) and zipping or backup software. Much cheaper than buying a hard drive and pretty light as a shipment.

[Indrestudios]

Interesting...not even sure if my DVD burner will support writing dual layer. Will all DVD drives read them? Even as big as 8gig?

[macleodgrant]

blu ray is pretty cool with storage up to 50gig i believe though i only saw 25gig discs

[LX3]

Bear in mind that at 20MB/s (a fairly typical copy speed from one hard drive to another) it'll take about half an hour to copy 30GB of audio.

Writing to DVD-R takes between three and six times as long as writing to hard disk. And that's not accounting for the time it takes to swap discs. There's also the verify stage to consider, so double that time again.

Blu-Ray should be a little faster than DVD-R - but very few of your clients will have BD-ROM drives any time soon.

I personally draw the line at supplying audio on any more than three DVD-Rs (i.e. approx 12GB). Beyond that I always send the client a hard drive.

[Indrestudios]

Thanks for all of the suggestions. I wound up purchasing a handful of Lacie "little disk" 160 gig FW portables for about $120 a piece. No power supply, so the Euro voltage difference isn't an issue. They are really small, and shipping is minimal. The DVD option is very interesting, just don't have the time right now to devote to the transfers. As a matter of course, we keep a copy on file until I know the client has received & proofed their copy.

The bands are paying for the drives + shipping to each exotic destination. I frequently tell friends that the best piece of gear we ever purchased was our credit card machine.


-MC