Here’s an amazing story: A professor in Sweden, having placed his laptop outside of his apartment unattended, inevitably had his laptop stolen. That’s not the amazing part. The amazing part was that a week later, the professor received a USB stick in the mail – complete with all of his files backed up on it. Now you could call this a considerate thief (or at least more considerate than usual – since he did steal the laptop after all), but quite honestly with the price and size of USB memory these days, there was probably no consideration involved. Instead, with a 16 GB USB thumb drive going for 25 dollars or less, it was probably the least that guy felt he could do. The crazy part is that just a few short years ago, USB memory sticks were so expensive that if that same thief mailed one to the professor, it may have been good enough to put a down payment on a brand new laptop. Instead, even thieves are literally giving them away now.

With the onset of cheaper SSD drives, hard disk drive prices have taken a bigger nosedive than Mel Gibson’s career. In that same manner, Western Digital just announced the first 3 TB hard drive that comes in at only $240. Each platter on this massive drive can write up to 750 GB worth of data while supposedly running whisper quiet. That seems to be a pretty sensible price for a drive considering that just a year ago a 1 TB hard drive could come in at the same price. All things considered, it’s nice to know that the progress of technological innovation seems to be going as fast as ever – all at an affordable price.

When HD was first introduced to the video world back in the 1990’s, IT departments at production houses around the world gave a collective groan. Back then the best video transfer speeds were 50 MB/s with a Firewire cable, making HD video transfers a huge vortex of wasted time. With the advent of Firewire 800 (which was capable of speeds up to 100 MB/s) and eSATA (with speeds up to 380 MB/s), video transfer speeds took a huge leap forward. Even so, video editors were still losing precious years of their life waiting for HD projects to transfer from one hard disk to another.

Now USB 3.0 is looking to solve that problem. With the support of manufacturers such as Sony, Intel, Microsoft, Compaq, and IBM, USB has quickly become the connection of choice for computer equipment ranging from keyboards and mice, to coffee warmers and iPods. As a result, USB cables and connections have become by far the most common in the computer world. So when USB 3.0 was announced in 2007 with speeds up to 400 MB/s, the video world quickly realized that there was huge potential behind the new technology due to its many features and advantages.

One of the greatest features of USB 3.0 is that a 25 GB file can be transferred in just 70 seconds essentially eliminating the frustration of wasted time when transferring large HD assets from one hard drive to another. Additionally, with such high read/write speeds, USB 3.0 has become a viable connection for editing on external hard drives without the speed delays of current connections. This gives studios and editors a reasonable workflow option in a world where solid state media recording has become the new norm. With rapidly falling prices on external storage, studios now have the option to buy hard drives such as Buffalo’s newly released SuperSpeed USB 3.0 external DriveStation HD, edit on them, and then store them much like tapes were stored in the past. The advantages of this set-up is when a client asks for a re-edit on an old project, instead of having to reconnect footage from tape, studios can simply connect their external hard drive using USB 3.0 to their computer and start editing right away saving huge amounts of transfer time. Lastly, another potential advantage of USB 3.0 is its increase in the market. It is quite possible that if you are at a friend’s house with a USB 3.0 hard drive and no cable, that your friend will probably have a USB 3.0 cable for you to hook your hard drive to your computer.

As great as USB 3.0 could be for video editors, there are also some other interesting products that could be a great boon to the video-editing world. Just this last May, the Serial ATA Organization announced the specs for SATA revision 3.0, allowing for transfer speeds of up to 700 MB/s. Also, Intel also announced a curious new technology called Light Peak. Light Peak is an optical cable standard that can deliver bandwidth from 1.25 GB/s to 12.5 GB/s. Whichever technology becomes the standard, one thing is for sure: the future for HD video production has never looked so good.

Reprinted from a Verbatim press release

Verbatim Americas, LLC announced today its new ”TUFF-N-TINY” family of ultra-portable USB drives with capacities of 4GB in emerald green and 8GB in royal purple.  Among the most compact, durable USB flash drives on the market, the new TUFF-’N'-TINY drives measure about 1-inch long, one-half inch wide and are the thickness of a penny.  Ideal for storing, backing up, sharing and transporting data and multimedia files, Verbatim TUFF-’N'-TINY USB Drives are available with retail prices starting as low as $30.00.

The 8GB drive can be used to store nearly eight hours of MPEG-1 video, about 2,000 hours of MP3 music, about 4,000 300dpi color photos or 8GBs of personal and business files. Read the rest of this entry »