Dealing with the rumble in the jungle...

Things were about to get real on January 2nd 2018. My equipment was already on its way to Borneo and now it's time for me. What could possibly go wrong..? Or what could possibly not go wrong...

During those 61 days of shooting, (and 30 days of 2 unit shooting parallel) there was a lot we had to deal with. I'd like to focus more on the technical side of things here. In that regard, it's save to say that we were well prepared. Focus Puller / 1st AC Benjamin Fernando took a lot of different scenarios and considerations into account and made sure that all of the equipment sent from Switzerland, including mine, arrived functional and intact in Borneo.

Speaking of it, I took the following setup with me:

- BlackPearl Sys workstation in a Pelican Case Air 1615.

- 770W Eaton online UPS built in a Pelican Case 1460.

- An additional Pelican Case Air 1615 with workstation spare parts, tools of all kinds and hard drives.

- Several smaller Pelican Cases for hard drive handling and off-site backup.

I asked Seagate and Western Digital for inputs about which hard drives to use since heat and high humidity are the two worst things for hard drives. While Seagate was somewhat helpful, Western Digital was not at all. They just replied they wouldn't have any data about such use cases without any additional information about what might be the best bet. Moreover, they started explaining to me how hard drives work and that I should have more than one copy of the footage. (Seriously WD?? You think so??) I wasn't expecting that they could offer me a "jungle proof, heavy duty" hard drive, but maybe at least a hint which technology potentially has a higher chance of survival. STEP UP YOUR SUPPORT GAME WESTERN DIGITAL!

While Seagate also didn't quite understood what I wanted, at least they could confirm from a technology standpoint that helium sealed drives are my best bet. Conventional hard drives (mostly under 8TB of capacity) have small air holes. My concern was, that condensation might occur inside of those drives. With high capacity drives, this is less of a problem, and since we expected about 50 to 60 TB, (times three for backup) handling those drives was a little more convenient.

So, how about that Pelican Workstation then..?

The goal was to have the whole workflow on set up and running. Which means:

- Backup footage and audio to three different target drives.

- Sync audio and video

- on set grading according to the vision of the DoP

- export rushes for DoP, director and production

- export proxies for Avid

- live footage exposure and signal control with Scope Box

It worked like a charm. Most of the footage was 3.2K ProRes4444XQ, sometimes 3.4K OpenGate ArriRaw. We shot 72 hours of footage and the workstation crunched through all of it. It never failed, it never let me down. Which can't be said for some laptops and smartphones from other people in our crew. I opened devices on a weekly bases, trying to dry it and get it up and running again. Sometimes it worked, sometimes corrosion already has taken over the PCB.

For me, I got the job done and I will continue using this setup for situations where a compact setup is preferred without giving up functionality.

BlackPearl Sys

BlackPearl Sys

BlackPearl Sys