I can remember the days when I would rent gear (or use my own), shoot in a location near my home and Fed EX the tapes overnight across the country to an editor for a major client.

Those days still occur, but now I find myself Fed EX’ing inexpensive USB hard drives across the United States. Technology is changing and I am just going with the flow.

I was asked to shoot some b-roll of Elena Della Donne playing volleyball at Northeastern University for CBS college sports Network. Della Donne lived and breathed basketball most of her life, and she was one of the best and most gifted basketball players in the game. When she finally got the nod to play at UConn, she quit after three days. She decided that basketball was not her calling and decided to play volleyball for Delaware instead.

CBS is doing a documentary on the pressures of College D1 basketball and they just needed some generic footage of Della Donne playing ball and laughing it up with her teammates.

They overnight’ed me a LaCie rugged 250GB USB hard drive and included a return Fed Ex overnight label. I drove to Northeastern and I shot about 12GB of footage at 1080 24p and overcranked some shots at 720 30p at 60 FPS. When I got home, I simply transferred the footage from the Sony SxS cards to the CBS hard drive with my Mac Book Pro. That is it.

I placed the drive back in the Express FED EX pouch and returned it to New York.

This gig marked the first time I had ever shot with a naked EX1. Many people who read this blog have emailed me asking if the Letus Extreme was cemented to my EX1. Well, yes it is. But some clients still want “normal” looking video. This footage had to match CBS’s existing style, and they shoot their stuff with naked EX1s and EX3s. It is nice to see a major television network embracing Sony’s SxS solid state XDCAM EX cameras.