We've spent a lot of time improving our workflow and cutting time out where we can but one place it's still bottle necking is downloading our cards after a shoot. We just shot a wedding yesterday and I've spent the last 3 hours downloading all our cards. It's like watching paint dry!

I looked into a Lexar card reader that you can daisy-chain together to download faster but the sales rep at the camera store said they only work with UDMA cards. We're currently using SanDisk Ultra II 4GB cards because the 5D buffer can't write at the speeds of some of the faster cards. I looked online at B&H and they say that the reader will work fine with regular CF cards

So...my question is, are any of you using a card reader like this with standard CF cards and if so, how long is it taking for you to download each card? Are you able to download multiple cards using the LR 2.0 auto-downloader?

Any help would be appreciated!

Thanks!

Duane

A) Sandisk TransferMate reader
B) Don't daisy chain - it's bad.

This Sandisk FireWire Reader works with both UDMA and standard CF cards. It will connect via either FW800 or FW400 which is pretty sweet. For the price you can't beat it! It's blazing fast with UDMA cards, which, somewhere down the road if you end up getting them, you will LOVE the superfast transfer speeds offered by 300X cards like the Lexar Pro series.

good luck!

buying fast cards is not only for just the camera write speed but mainly for the download speed when you are offloading them.

In fact even those that have the cameras that can write to them fast, how many times do you actually shoot like that?

So you see my point is.. even if you can't write to the faster cards, I would still buy them to speed up the offload process.

soooooo true. worth every penny for UDMA cards!

I'll second/thrice the Lexar FireWire 800 reader and UDMA cards. I can transfer a full 4GB card in about 2 mintues or less. I thought about the daisy chain thing, but seriously a whole wedding (20GB) takes about 10 minutes to transfer with one reader. I'm not that short on time where I need to shave 5 minutes off my workflow.

Matt, can you share your thoughts on why this is bad? Thanx.

I have to second this one. Trevor steered me to that Sandisk firewire reader, which I bought, thank you very much, Trevor, and I bought 4 300x 4gig cards. Now I want to dump all my old 133x cards and every old reader I own. The reader combined with those high speed cards makes a huge difference in download time. Yay!

But, last time I was in B&H (maybe 2 weeks ago), the guy at the counter told me they were discontinuing 300x cards. Don't know if that's true. And I don't know why they would do that, or if there's something newer and faster coming out.

I download 2 cards at once after every shoot. One FW400 reader (Lexar) and one Sandisk FW800 reader (the one Trevor mentioned). It works good. 3 hours is WAY too long. After a wedding it takes me about 1/2 hour to download ~20-30GB from 4-6 cards including time to swap cards. I do a straight copy in Finder, no trust for LR or any other helpful program....

After each card downloads I compare the number of files on the card to the number of files in the folder. Before I use the cards again, the files are backed up and LR previews have been built to verify no corrupt files.

Yes, if you use one USB hub and 2 readers, info can "bump" into each other. If this happens, you don't get the correct downloads and you can have corrupt downloads. Since most of the time, it'll download the right "number" of files, the only way to know you had corrupted half your stuff would be to check every image before deleting the cards. Not a great solution.

Now, using 2 readers & 2 USB ports - that's just smart. That sandisk transfermate that I have (2 of) downloads 1 gig in 80 seconds. 20 gig in 26 minutes. For two readers that's 20 gig in 15 mins including swap time. That's worth not having corruption.

I also TOTALLY agree! I use Transcend 300x UDMA cards with a Sandisk UDMA FW800 reader and it flies. One thing I have to say if you don't ever buffer out shooting, is the 133x Transcend cards which I also have a couple of, actually read at UDMA speeds! True story!

Thanks very much for all the great advice! Sadly the improvement to this area of the workflow sounds expensive!

????

$40 for two transfermates. If you need to download faster than 10 gig in 15 minutes, yeah it could get costly. But that's fast.

USB isn't made to be "daisy chained". You have to use hubs with USB to make that happen and errors are inevitable. Firewire is designed to daisy chain. There really is no reason not to stack especially if you need to download multiple cards.

To be doubly sure, I suggest using Photomechanic to INGEST your files. It recognizes several drives and can automatically put each card in a separate folder (Card 1, Card 2, Card 3...etc) I am a huge fan of this program because if you are doing slideshows on site, it brings up RAW previews 5 times faster than any other program I've seen. I use it for uploading, attaching metadata and editing. That's it.

Best Buy....GREAT sale:
http://www.bestbuy.com/site/olspage.jsp?sk...d=1175389460846

I use my old 40x Lexar cards on these with no problem. Your best bet is to buy two of these and invest in new 4GB cards: B&H has them listed at $30 each after a mail in rebate:

http://www.bhphotovideo.com/bnh/controller...replacementLink

4GB Lexar 300x or Sandisk Extreme IV cards download in less than 3 minutes with the firewire 800 readers. The speeds stay up there when stacked as well. I've brought my 3 reader stack to a couple of weddings now and people's eyes almost fall out of their heads. The wedding is done and the cards are uploaded before we've finished packing.

So, for $150, you could by 2 new readers and 3 new cards.

Hi,

there was a thread here where a Sandisk usb reader was highly recommended, and I bought it. True, it was fast.

But I found the firewire reader below, and it is blisteringly fast compared to all others I have (have had). Love it!

Hugh

Fast Reader Link

I definitely recommend the Lexar firewire stackable readers currently on sale at Best Buy. Firewire IS made to daisy chain so there is no problem there. Its an amazing deal on a great reader (I have 4 of them).

The camera store rep didn't know what they were talking about when they said it was UDMA only... they are UDMA enabled, but will read any of the older technologies as well.

-Dave

+lots of 1's and 0's!

I have non UDMA cards and they still download too (FW800 reader) - Im slowly replacing them with UDMA cards because... *gets real excited* its sooo darn fast to download!!