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Best workflow for me and my assistant editor?
So, here’s the situation\; I am currently cutting a feature film and, a first for me, will have an assistant editor. He’s a good kid and I’m trying to help him get some credits, so I agreed to allow him to assist me. However, he will not be working at my studio. I’m trying to figure out the best, most efficient and cost-effective way to allow him to assist me without making my life insane. Basically, he will be cleaning up the audio, laying in temp music and SFX and, of course, I will allow him to do a pass on a scene or two. He has some graphic skills, so I might also let him set up some of the VFX, as well.
Anyway, I’m trying to figure out how to make the workflow work in light of the fact that he will be working on his own system at a semi-distant location. Should I be buying a second, identical, SATA array and literally clone the entire project and all media, etc., to that so that he has a “mirrored” system at his place and then he can just upload FCP project files to my ftp? Can I set up a Gigabit Ethernet RAID array and just have him log on access my system? He doesn’t need a lot of RT or high-level performance, but I would like to use a setup that makes his workflow efficient as well.
Are there other options that I’m not considering? Like I said, I’ve never really had the benefit of an Assistant Editor before and certainly not a distant one, so this a brand new playing field for me. Any guidance would be much appreciated. Though the main point is to help a young hopeful get some experience on a feature, I’d rather not invest any substantial amount of money in a solution that only works for this project and/or only to his benefit.
Thanks.
Trip Gould
Editor – Composer – Professor -
1 Reply
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[ventureforth] ” Should I be buying a second, identical, SATA array and literally clone the entire project and all media, etc., to that so that he has a “mirrored” system at his place and then he can just upload FCP project files to my ftp?”
This the the easiest way to swap data files (such as project files, timeline XMLs, whatever). If the hard drives are named exactly the same (boot drive and external media drive) and have the same directory structure, this will make life easy. The only problem is how are you going to swap graphic files or any hard media? If he’s cleaning up audio, he’s going to have to send you the renders and if he creates hard GFX media, he’s going to have to send you that. If you have an ftp site, this could be possible depending on what format and codec you are working in, but will get impossible pretty quick if the shots are long and you are working in uncompressed HD. Theoretically, if you have identical media he can set up all the stuff (like clean up the audio, make the GFX project, whatever) and you do the renders locally. I used to do this with a VFX artist in New Mexico while I’m located in Chicago. The initial footage transfer required a FedEx, but after that we pretty much used FTP to transfer project files. If any new media needed to be sent to him, we’d either FedEx a hard drive or Data DVD. He would then just send project back that we would render locally. It worked out great.
Jeremy
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