Samsung X Ducati
Posted on May 7, 2024 by Samara Husbands
Where heritage meets innovation
With a history in technical excellence, Samsung and motorcycle giant Ducati made for a dream duo in a key shoot with the Samsung Portable SSD T7 Shield
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When legendary motorcycle brand Ducati made its first move into racing off-road bikes this year, only the best would do.
That includes putting top engineers on the project and hiring the nine-time world motocross champion Tony Cairoli to ride the bike.
As the reigning world champion in the MotoGP series, Ducati has incredible heritage in racing and pushes innovation at all times. Second best isn’t good enough for everything the Italian brand does.
So when it came time to hire a filmmaker for an exclusive video shoot to unveil the new bike and its rider to the world, the obvious choice was one of the best action sports cinematographers in the world, Mikey Neale.
He’s travelled the globe shooting everything from Formula One to rally cars, motorcycle racing to his first love as a proud Welshman, rugby.
Armed with his 8K camera and a bagful of lenses, this important shoot was held on a private track in Italy, and the pressure was on to get it right first time with no chance of a reshoot.
So Neale chose his crew and kit carefully – including his choice of memory.
“Everything is shot at a fast pace – and my kit is never mollycoddled. Whether on the shoot or in transit, all the equipment can take a few knocks,” says Neale. “In the past, I’ve had two hard drives go down, which is a nightmare. Nowadays, only a rugged, portable SSD will do. And I chose the Samsung Portable SSD T7 Shield, which proved to be ideal.”
The Samsung portable drive has shown it’s up to the toughest jobs as it uses an aluminium body for strength and heat dissipation. And it comes with a rubber cover to fend off knocks.
“It’s tough but very compact, which I really like, too. For international travel, size and weight are important – and this ticks all the right boxes.” Weighing just 98g and at 88mm long and 13mm thick, it’s seriously solid yet comes in sizes up to 4TB.
What sets Neale apart from many action shooters is his unique cinematic style, which sees him deliver incredibly creative results. He fine-tuned his skills shooting projects featuring legendary actors, but for his action work, he loves to mix in high frame rates and speed ramping in post-production to create a stunning, immersive look.
“I love to shoot 8K in 120p, or 240p if you record in 4K. Go to 2K and 600fps is available,” he says. “I love to play with different speeds as well as lots of cinematic movements using a gimbal. It makes my work stand out.”
But high frame rates and a camera that shoots such high resolution means the data is huge when recording, storing and transferring.
That’s where Samsung’s Portable SSD T7 Shield proved invaluable.
It is capable of high-sustained write performance, which allows recording of up to 12K video.
The 8K files from the shoot were no problem for the portable drive, which was used to store backups on location using a laptop.
Read and write performance for the Samsung Portable SSD T7 Shield is up to 1050MB/s and 1000MB/s.
The laptop’s Thunderbolt connection is key to reaching these incredible speeds, and the portable drive comes plug-and-play ready for all the latest macOS products.
The portable drive also works on PC and Android, and comes pre-loaded with the necessary drivers.
The Samsung Portable SSD T7 Shield allows you to set a custom name and password, and Samsung Magician software monitors health and boosts performance – as well as letting users change settings.
That’s because Samsung has a long history of making the best, fastest, highest-performing products that will last and deliver the best results.
So, a lot like Ducati then.
This feature was first published in the May 2024 issue of Definition.
