DIT Compromises: When Ideal Meets Indie Chaos

Hey everyone, as a documentary filmmaker, I'm constantly chasing the perfect DIT workflow. You know the drill, dual backups, checksum verification, organized folder structures, the whole nine yards. But then reality hits hard on those lean, mean indie sets where every dollar and minute counts.

I was shooting a doc last year, practically a one-woman band with a sound op. We were in a remote location with inconsistent power, and a crucial interview day meant we had to forego bringing a full DIT cart. Instead of robust hard drives and proper offloading software, I was forced to use an external SSD straight from the camera's card reader to my laptop, then copy-pasting to a single backup drive. It made me incredibly nervous. My mitigation was to triple-check file sizes and quickly browse a few clips on set, something I'd never do under normal circumstances.

So, my genuine question is: In an ideal world, we want perfect DIT. But on a chaotic indie set, when does the 'What You Don't' list become unavoidable? And for those times, what's your story of compromise, and how did you mitigate the inherent risks?