Yes, we can record the entire marathon - but I need your hel

Brian Boyko · Post by **Brian Boyko** » June 21st, 2009, 5:37 pm

Okay, YES, we can record the entire 40 hour marathon, but it's not going to be easy.

We can set up the camera and microphone, and it will record to a SD card. All we have to do is keep feeding the system new SD cards, and it'll work.

The trick is that you can only record 90 minutes on a 4GB SD card, 3 hours on an 8 GB SD card, and 6 hours on a 16GB SD card.

I simply do not have enough SD cards.

However, if we can get everyone in the Improv community to bring in as many 4GB or higher SD cards that they have lying around, we can label them with names, reformat them, and just keep switching them out when the time comes. Plus, there's the hard drive, which we can record 20 continuous hours on, so we can use that for the final stretch.

Also, I'm posting this here because Andy's acrouch@heroesofcomedy.com had permanent fatal errors (I think his mailbox is full.)

acrouch · Post by **acrouch** » June 21st, 2009, 8:32 pm

It's true. www.heroescomedy.com is dead. You guys can all reach me at acrouch shat gmail shot com or andy spat hideouttheatre splot com.

Anybody got the thingamagigs that Brian is talking about so we can record this foolishness for posterity?

djpenn · Post by **djpenn** » June 21st, 2009, 10:25 pm

If you've got a laptop, when one card gets full, you can dump it while the other is recording. Swap and dump, ad infinitum. Get two 8GB cards and you can do it every other show.

arthursimone · Post by **arthursimone** » June 21st, 2009, 10:58 pm

someone should just front 75 bucks for a big external hard drive to dump everything onto

Justin D. · Post by **Justin D.** » June 21st, 2009, 11:00 pm

arthursimone wrote:someone should just front 75 bucks for a big external hard drive to dump everything onto

How many gigs are needed for that?

I'm either dumb and can't do the math or lazy and don't want to. You decide.

Brian Boyko · Post by **Brian Boyko** » June 22nd, 2009, 11:31 pm

The two-card swap works, I think, the trick now is to find people who are willing to swap out the cards once every 5 hours. I also have external hard drives to spare; I'm bringing a 500 GB one.

The only thing I'm worried about is that, because I'm going from SD card through USB to hard drive, again through USB, is that it might actually take longer to get the files off the SD card than it would to record the next 5 hours worth of shows.

Shouldn't - but I've never tried it.

The other concern with swap and dump is that, as a general rule, just to be on the safe side, you -never- re-use recording media on the same project until you are SURE that you're not recording over something else.

Since I'm not going to be there for 40 hours, getting 40 hours worth of blank SD cards formatted and ready to go is going to be a lot simpler than trusting that people know to copy the files, delete the files, and leave the folder structure intact each time.