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Backing up project / splitting large Animation files
We usually back up all our projects on CD-ROM or DVD, saving all project files, timelines, After Effects documents, Photoshop files, graphics, logos, music, and all other used files and media. Most of the time, the whole thing holds on a single CD-ROM or DVD. Whenever needed, we can easily re-build any project within a couple of hours of re-digitizing media and bringing them back online. This way of backing up our projects has been very useful so far, and it’s relatively ‘light’ both in terms of procedure and media back up.
However, this time we’ve made the ‘mistake’ of re-importing 3 rendered Animation clips from After Effect, back as source clips in AE in order to make corrections. So if we ever want to re-build this project, we WILL have to save the 3 Animation clips, otherwise we’ll lose the modifications that were made and will not be able to re-build the project from scratch.
SO what I want to do, exceptionnally, is to back up these 3 Animation files as well as all our project files. However they’re too big to fit on 1 DVD (7-8 Gb each). So I would like to split each of them, and save them on 2 DVDs each. Is there any way I can do this without going through the pain of splitting them in a timeline and exporting them ? Is there a tool that allows to split a large clip file in 2 smaller clip files without doing it in an FCP timeline and exporting ? It’s important that after the whole process of splitting and eventually re-joining each files together they be PRECISELY the same length in order to re-connect them in After Effects.
Thanks in advance. Also, if you have any thoughts on how we could make our backup procedure easier / faster / more efficient / more useful, please feel free to share with us.
Best regards,
Marco
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2 Replies
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Marco,
With hard drives as cheap as they are now, you can afford to have several just for archiving, You could use one for primary and one for backup. As they’d just sit on shelf ’til you need to re-activate the project, it is highly unlikely they’d go down, but then you’d have the backup too.
Another suggestion which I do a lot, is just re-render the files from AE when you need them. If it’s a long render, do it an night or over the weekend.
Finally, you can cut the files in QT Pro, they don’t have to be the same length, just pick a cut or other notable occurance somewhere near the middle, and copy and paste each half into a new QT file with a few frames of handle on either side. It’s pretty painless to do a match frame on the two pieces to reuse them. I do this method all the time, but, I am also using the drive storage method more and more.
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Thanks Chris,
Yes, the hard drive route is a possible solution, however, I wanted to archive ‘once and for all’ and not worry about it anymore. I keep all my projects in a binder on CD-ROM and DVD.
About using QuickTime Pro, I tried it and it worked fine, except it turns out to be even longer than importing the clip in FCP, cutting it in the timeline and exporting it with current settings (i.e. Animation codec in this case). It take 2-3 minutes in FCP, vs. 12-15 in QuickTime Pro. The other odd thing about doing it in QT Pro is that once I re-import the 2 clips into FCP to join them back together (as I would at re-building stage), I find myself being 1 frame short in duration. This doesn’t happen when I perform the split in FCP.
All in all, I think I’ll just keep cutting clips in FCP. Unless another application allows to perform the cut-in-half directly at the file level…
Thanks again.
Marco
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