While not many people do it, shooting LOG footage on your iPhone nets you the best footage possible, but those files can be huge, with 50-second clips taking up 1GB of space.
While I loved the small size of Dockcases’ Photography edition SSD earlier this year, I found it a bit annoying since you needed some form of camera cage for your phone to attach it. This year, the company remedied that by making a small portable SSD with magnets in the back so you can simply stick it to your phone when you’re shooting. Using an SSD on your iPhone also makes it much easier to transfer a lot of footage to your laptop instead of relying on AirDrop.
Furthermore, one of the two versions of this device has power pass-through, so you can shoot LOG directly to the SSD and still plug in the phone to charge when you’re doing long shoots. Be wary when you’re buying because the 15-watt version won’t charge your phone, so I suspect most people will want to pay the slightly higher price for the 100-watt version.
There is also a read-only mode and 3 seconds of power loss protection to help ensure all your data finishes saving even if it gets unplugged or the phone it’s connected to dies.
The SSD fits the small 2230 and 2242 M.2 SSDs and can support storage up to 2TBs, which should allow for a decent amount of shooting depending on what you’re capturing. For instance, my review unit is only 128GB, and it can record 28 minutes of 4K ProRes LOG at 24fps, but when I go to capture 120fps, I can only get 4 minutes of footage onto it. I’d recommend getting the biggest SSD you can afford for anyone buying this device. The SSD enclosure also uses the USB 3.2 spec, so it can quickly transfer files off the drive to your computer. In my uses so far, I’ve had no complaints with its speed.
As with the photography edition, I found the screen to be fairly lacklustre. Don’t get me wrong—it looks cool, but the information on it is pretty useless in day-to-day work. Dockcase really has to find a way for the display to show how much storage is left on the drive, or I think they should cut the screen altogether since the rest of the info doesn’t justify the cost of adding the screen. Sure, it’s cool to see your read/write speeds, but it’s unnecessary, and since it can’t show me how much space is left on my drive, it feels super gimmicky.
Right now, you can get the device with 100-watts of power pass-through on Kickstarter for $69USD (roughly $95 CAD) with the super early bird deal, but it will retail at some point for $99 USD (roughly $135 CAD). There is also $37 CAD shipping. However, if you look around there are other options on Amazon that do cost a bit less and still offer similar features without a screen.
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