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Archiving project files and associated materials offline
We’re beginning an experiment in our shop with removable 1Tb. Firewire drives. The plan is to try archiving Final Cut projects and key video, audio, and stills onto these when a program is finished, so we can “nuke” the FCP workstation’s capture scratch drives and make room for a flood of incoming projects. Phase two of the experiments will be trying to reconstitute the projects from that backup drive. What will be stored are projects that recur every year and need minor tweaks, typically finished lengths of 30 minutes or less, certainly no more than an hour per program. This may be too basic a question for the regular forum, I won’t be offended if anyone says so, but here goes…
Specifically addressing this setup, what would you advise in terms of protocols and procedures as to how best to archive only the needed files? What’s the most common mistake made, in your experience? Is it really just as simple as, media manager>condense the media>copy the condensed media and project file? And on the “bring it back to life” side, what do you do there? Just assign a scratch with a matching name>drop the media there> import and open the project file? Oh, for it to be that easy…
I don’t want to get into a discussion about SAN’s or anything else network-related right now, please, let’s keep it to just this one thing in this case.
But any opinions/specific advice on it are most welcome. Thanks.
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8 Replies
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Mark,
This is actually pretty simple. Media Manager will very nicely do the job for you, allowing your computer to do what it does best (using its database to manage loads of files), with a minimum of thought and effort on your part. Ya with me so far?
The Media Manager “copy” function is very much user-selective, much like the similar function in Edit* used to be, in the sense that it will copy files to a new location only from selected timelines, bins, etc. that use specifies and it will make a new project file in the process too.
For example, if your final timeline happens to contain everything you wish to archive, you highlight on that sequence in the browser before starting Media Manager, and it will only copy the media used in that particular sequence. If you want all media in that sequence plus everything in one or more bins, you highlight those before opening MM. Got it???
David Roth Weiss
Director/Editor
David Weiss Productions, Inc.
Los AngelesPOST-PRODUCTION WITHOUT THE USUAL INSANITY ™
A forum host of Creative COW’s Apple Final Cut Pro, Business & Marketing, and Indie Film & Documentary forums.
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We’ll see… gonna give it a try later today. They tried the drag-and drop thing before you posted, and the results were haphazard. We eventually managed to get the video files into the bin, but then had to go in and manually re-locate each one one at a time to get them to connect up and re-establish on the timeline as playable. Your way sounds way simpler, we’ll give it a go and report back.
Any other tips still welcome regarding methods and your own shop’s procedures when doing this sort of thing.
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[Mark Suszko] “They tried the drag-and drop thing before you posted, and the results were haphazard.”
As I said before, Media Manager works using the database created in FCP, and so no relinking of files is necessary. This is what your computer was designed for… Just do it…
David Roth Weiss
Director/Editor
David Weiss Productions, Inc.
Los AngelesPOST-PRODUCTION WITHOUT THE USUAL INSANITY ™
A forum host of Creative COW’s Apple Final Cut Pro, Business & Marketing, and Indie Film & Documentary forums.
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“So shall it be written, so shall it be done!”
Will try and report back after lunch.
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I have done this 20 times now. Shows edited on a SAN (6 work stations), and then when it comes time for me to online, I use the MEDIA MANAGER to COPY all the footage, delete unused media and have 5 second handles…all the footage goes to an internal SATA drive. Picture files, media files, music and sound effects. They all get thrown into one folder, but they are all on that one drive. And I have the MM create a new project for this as well.
Worked fine for me for 20 episodes…and I have another 20 to do on this one series, and 13 on another…then 3 specials. And we need to revisit shows on occasion and fix things, so I just insert the drive with that show (3 shows fit on one 1TB drive) and work from that. Slick as snot.
Shane
GETTING ORGANIZED WITH FINAL CUT PRO DVD…don’t miss it.
Read my blog, Little Frog in High Def -
Good to know. Thanks.
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We’ve been using this same scenario for four years now, twenty episodes per year. People are definitely able to go back and reopen projects from the past. The one thing I would add is after you’ve made you’re MM version go into the browser and check the source for all the clips, make sure they’re in the MM media folder. I’ve found that ocassionally MM will not grab certain clips or graphics and I just manually move them, though to be honest in the last version of FCP that stopped being a problem, I just check out of habit.
Thanks,
Vince Sanchez
Intel Quad Mac 2.66
AJA LHe
HD link
OSX 10.4.11
FCP Studio 2 -
I, too, am looking for a good archiving solution for FCP. We have a very small shop but lots of footage, as you can imagine 🙂 We’ve been using the Firewire drive solution but it’s proving to be fairly inefficient at this point. I’ve read about Walter’s solution and am looking into that, although I’m a little concerned about archiving onto a drive again (sitting unused for a period of time etc…)
I’m wondering, Mark, how it went for you after all was said and done?
And does anyone else have an archival solution to share?
Thank you in advance!
~ Tess
PS: I love this forum!! A daily read :)))
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