(upbeat rock music)
- Hey guys, I'm Patrick.
I'm the Lead Editor and Producer at LumiForge
and today we're gonna be talking about
five ways that external hard drives waste your time.
Now, I don't know about you,
but whenever I'm working with an external hard drive,
it's great as long as I'm staying within
the amount of capacity that that one drive happens to have.
So if you're working with something like a
10 terabyte hard drive and you're working on
not a small project, but you know, not a feature film,
then you're probably fine.
And action.
But if you're working in 4K or 5K or 6K or 8K,
working with external hard drives,
especially when you're working with a team,
can be a big waste of time.
The first problem we can run into with external hard drives
is if you have a whole lot of hard drives
and you've got a lot of projects
spread across those hard drives,
it can be difficult to find the file
that you're looking for on the drive
that happens to have that file.
The second waste of time is copying your media.
Now, we do recommend that you have three copies
of your media in two places and only work from one.
You can find out more about that
in our storage and backup video.
However, when you're working with a team of people
and you're consistently getting new assets,
copying those assets across all of the various
working drives can be a real time suck.
The third waste of time is cabling drives.
Now, hear me out, it seems like that
may not be that big of a deal, right,
each drive has it's own cable,
until you have those 25 drives
and some are USB 3.0, some are Thunderbolt 2,
some are USB 1.0, some are USB 2.0,
some are eSATAp, some are Firewire 800,
some are... (dramatic music)
The list goes on and on and on.
If you're like me, you've found yourself
in the situation where you can find
all the cables except the one that you need
and you have to go looking throughout your entire office
or through some random drawer full of cables
to find the cable that you need.
That can be a major pain in the butt,
especially if you're passing things
back and forth on a regular basis,
because you know that when you're sharing that drive
with somebody else, that cable's gonna get lost eventually.
The fourth major waste of time is relinking.
So, I've got my copy of the media,
and you've got your copy of the media,
but then I download three different shots
off of the internet that you don't have
and I tell you where those shots are,
or maybe I even give those shots to you.
But I put them in a specific folder on my hard drive
and you don't have that folder.
And if our drives are named something different,
right, maybe I'm on Seagate 01 and you're on Promise,
those root names will change
the file path to that specific file.
So, if I'm passing you a project
that is expecting the name of my drive
and the folder structure of my drive,
then there's a good chance that you're going to have
broken links and you're going to need to relink.
Now, if you're doing this once, not a big deal,
but if you're working with somebody back and forth
on a regular basis, this relinking process
can really eat up a lot of time.
The fifth big waste of time is cataloging media.
At the very beginning we discussed that it can be an issue
if you don't know where your files are.
Now, a potential solution is to catalog your media
either in an Excel document or maybe use something
like NeoFinder to catalog all of your media,
but going through and indexing and cataloging each
of those drives is going to take a decent amount of time.
The more files you have, the more time it will take.
So, as you can tell, working on external hard drives,
especially when working with a team,
can be big waste of time.
If you would like to see how much time and money
you can save by moving to shared storage,
we've actually built a tool on our website
that you can use right now.
Feel free to click the link below,
and if you have any questions, let us know.
Thanks so much and we'll talk to you soon.