David Smith, left, films a scene from his documentary, Boris’ Brilliant Bike Ride, which he shot in Vietnam.

A pair of high-capacity hard drives from Seagate has helped an Australian filmmaker complete a documentary that tracks a group of bicyclists pedalling across Vietnam.

Independent filmmaker David Smith credited a donation of two 750-GB Seagate FreeAgent Pro external hard drives from Seagate with helping streamline the editing of his film. Smith compiled several hours of footage, which he shot using high-definition (HD) digital tape. The result is Boris’ Brilliant Bike Ride, a documentary that has helped former Australian boxing champ Barry Michael and 30 other cyclists raise $430,000 for the Muscular Dystrophy Association of Australia. More than 20,000 Australians are affected by neuromuscular diseases.

"We were only invited to join the trip two weeks before departure, so we set off with no script, just the itinerary," recalled Smith, who was often perched on the back of a motorcycle to film his subjects. "We had no option but to film pretty much everything that happened. Inevitably, we built up an enormous amount of footage to cover all our options."

The 22 hours of footage Smith captured worked out to about 15 GB of storage per hour—which expanded threefold by the time it was rendered for further image manipulation. Smith said managing and editing that footage was made easier with Seagate storage solutions. With the roomy FreeAgent Pro drive, people can access their digital content from anywhere, share it with anyone and sync to almost any device. The drive’s software automatically duplicates and moves selected content to multiple locations—email and contacts to an iPod, for example, or photos to an online site.

For Smith, however, the best thing about the FreeAgent Pro drive was the freedom it gave him during a challenging project.

"Having ample storage capacity, even for HD projects, means I no longer think about how to store the images," Smith said. "I can just focus on making the most of my footage."

The documentary itself was edited using Sony Vegas Pro 8 software, working with a Pentium 4 PC. One of the special features of the FreeAgent Pro drives is the option of eSATA connectivity. With a data-transfer rate of up to 3 Gb per second, Smith could edit directly from the external drive, as if it were plugged directly into his PC’s motherboard. The fast data-transfer speeds were "a huge time saver," Smith said.

The director used one of the FreeAgent Pro drives to store the entire project at his office, and used the other drive to safeguard a complete replica of the film, which he kept offsite.

"In a worst-case scenario, where the studio burns down and even the camera tapes are lost, it’s hugely consoling to know there’s a complete backup set of both the footage and the edited project safely housed at another location," Smith explained. "Without that Seagate backup drive, I would find it difficult to sleep at night."