Testimonials - Raymond Singer

Raymond Singer

As a storyteller with all aspects of the filmmaker's art, an actor with more than 100 starring roles on TV and film, and an award-winning theater director. Raymond Singer founded Cut to the Story to serve the industry with deep passion. With a background in advertising, copywriting and design, Cut to the Story is as uniquely suited to producing a narrative feature, creating a film for your website, company or event, as it is to taking your raw footage or ruff cut through edit and all phases of post-production

Letter From Raymond Singer:

OK, OK, hard drives are getting ubiquitous. Or so it seems. Go into a Big Box Store, grab a 1 TB SATA drive off the shelf for just over $100. Stick a bunch of ¡¥em in a box, get a RAID card, hook everything up and you're ready to edit like a pro. Ooh, so sorry to disappoint. It just doesn't work that way.

I'm an FCP editor. I work in SD, uncompressed HD, HDV, DVCPRO HD and 2K; grab media from P2 cards, hard drives, SXS cards and SD cards; manipulate images in Motion, Photoshop and After Effects. I use a slew of FCP plug-ins. I cut docs, features and web films. Some docs come with hundreds of hours of footage that has to be kept safe, available and usable. Sometimes I work on several different films at the same time. What I need are dependable drives in fast, safe RAID arrays that can keep up with all these formats; even when there's one, two, three or more streams of composited or manipulated video running on the timeline. And I need to see every frame. I have no sympathy for drives that are gasping to keep up.

And because despite my best efforts, Murphy's Law will sometimes rear up and bite you in the butt, I need a company and tech support that's available, knowledgable, devoted to its user base and respects my intelligence and understands my needs as an editor. The last thing I want to hear is a recorded voice or a tech support person who thinks I don't know my way around. If I need help, I need it now. From someone who knows more than I do.

That's why I use CalDigit drives. Only CalDigit drives. They work. They don't drop frames. They don't quit. They're supported 24/7, 365 days a year. When you call CalDigit, you talk to a person. When you want information or need help, you get it.

I've used the early S2VR drives [still do], the HDPro and the HDOne. They're all great. Is one better than the other? It depends on what your needs are, what the demands of the project are. That's the point. Maybe you don't need an HDPro. Maybe you do. Talk to Jon or Leslie and they'll get you into the right system based on the projects you work on. They won't recommend what you don't need.

If you want to see performance benchmarks and how seriously CalDigit takes everything they do, even shipping, take a look at this review.
http://www.lafcpug.org/reviews/review_caldigit_hdone.html

If you want a great hard drive system, one that will handle whatever you throw at it and will perform day-in and day-out, get yourself a CalDigit drive. You'll be really, really glad you did.

By the way, CalDigit drives are pretty darn good looking, too. So is the thoughtful, easy to use GUI. What else do you need?