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Newbie Question,Acquiring Footage
I’ve been tasked to put together a vacation video. My source will be from consumer , pro-sumer camcorders & a variety of different dslr’s & point & shoot cameras. I know one camcorder was recording to an internal hard drive, & the other I believe to a sd card. All these cameras are across the country now & I need all the footage & photos so I can start editing. Initially I was thinking of having everybody just transfer their material to dvd’s & send them via mail, but since the final output will be dvd I didn’t think I wanted the material to be compressed twice, maybe I’m wrong. Any suggestions would be grateful. I guess my next question if I my be so bold is what would be a preferable sequence setting for this task, with possible multiple formats ? Knowing the final output will be on dvd, ( a dv setting or a prores422 setting).
Thanks in-advance
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10 Replies
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You’re between a rock and a hard place. If you really think things through you have VERY limited options. I doubt you can have every person encoded the footage to ProRes-they would all have to have FCP. Some of the footage would be too large to transfer over the internet. I’m sure some of the people would have a hard time even getting the footage into a editable format? If they could, how would you get it? DVD-Rs are too small to hold more than 1/2 of DV footage, so you might need them to break it up into serveral DVD-Rs. The files would be too big to send over a network.
So that doesn’t leave a lot of possibilities. The best case situation would be to send a Hard Drive to everyone and have them load their footage onto it for you. Or have everyone send you a hard drive. That way you’ll be able to control how to encode the footage and try to keep as much quality as you can. But that would require a lot of time to mail it around. Making a DV tape copy is a good choice, but still requires everyone to have a DV tape deck.
I guess my point it that you probably won’t have ONE solution that will work for everyone, you’ll need to figure it out on a case by case basis while still trying to retain the quality as much as possible.Good Luck,
Todd at UCSB
Television Production -
I might be able to sent out my hard drive. These friends might only have imovie & iphoto on there computers. What is your suggestion for telling them the best way to transfer the material to my new LaCie d2 Quadra Hard Drive 1TB. I might be able to get some of the dslr chips & buy a reader for them.
Thanks in advance
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For iMovie; exporting (self contained) in it’s ‘native’ format would be best-HD/SD.
iPhoto, it would be better to have them load the Raw camera files. Whatever format it’s in; tiff, jpeg, raw, etc. This way iPhoto won’t add any compression or modify the picture.
Good Luck,
Todd at UCSB
Television Production -
Don’t have them import or convert ANYTHING! Have them send you the raw files…every single file and folder they have on their recording medium. They need to back up each card or hard drive to a SEPARATE folder. Then you get the fun of converting everything to work with FCP.
Shane
GETTING ORGANIZED WITH FINAL CUT PRO DVD…don’t miss it.
Read my blog, Little Frog in High Def -
I’m new @ this, I would appreciate more info on how to go about this. How do I get the video files from an internal hard drive in Calif. to me in NY?
thanks in-advance
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You buy a small bus powered hard drive…something in the 250-320GB range that will hold the footage. Copy the footage to that drive. Box it up, UPS to NY…or FedEx, or snail mail.
Or spend the money on an FTP server. But to tell the truth, if you have 100GB of footage…it might get there quicker if you mail it.
Shane
GETTING ORGANIZED WITH FINAL CUT PRO DVD…don’t miss it.
Read my blog, Little Frog in High Def -
I can see how a new Lacie 320GB Rugged Triple Interface Portable Hard Drive 5200 rpm or an Lacie 500GB Rugged Triple Interface Portable Hard Drive 7200 could come in much handier for sending across the country to retreive the files.Unless you suggest another brand name.
But if you don’t mind explaining the process of getting the video files onto the hard drive without
importing them first , I can then relay this info down the line.Thanks in-advance
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Watch this: Tapeless Workflow for FCP 7 Tutorial
the first part explains how to fully back up tapeless media. Then to get it onto the drive…drag and drop.
Shane
GETTING ORGANIZED WITH FINAL CUT PRO DVD…don’t miss it.
Read my blog, Little Frog in High Def -
Thanks I’m going to watch it now, is there a different workflow for FCP6 ?
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Well, this is what I have for FCP 6…
Shane
GETTING ORGANIZED WITH FINAL CUT PRO DVD…don’t miss it.
Read my blog, Little Frog in High Def
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