betacam sp capture

[David Roth weiss]

Maria,

You can’t possibly get by without additional hard drives for several reasons.

1) Your 60 to 80 hours of Betacam, even if captured to DV will take up 780Gb to 1040Gb of storage, and then you need room for render files and exports, not to mention at least 10% free space minimum required on every drive to insure they simply keep working.

2) If you ever do recapture at 8-bit uncompressed you’ll need much more storage space and the additional throughput of a raid (often referred to as speed) to edit and playback without dropping frames.

The bottom line is, if you’re going to play hardball (i.e. make a feature) you have to have the basic tools for the job. Bare 1Gb hard drives are only $100 per terabyte these days, so, at a minimum, get your self a firewire 800 enclosure and learn how to populate it with drives and learn how to stripe them into a raid.

David Roth Weiss
Director/Editor
David Weiss Productions, Inc.
Los Angeles

POST-PRODUCTION WITHOUT THE USUAL INSANITY ™

A forum host of Creative COW’s Apple Final Cut Pro, Business & Marketing, and Indie Film & Documentary forums.

[Maria Benjamin]

Thank you for responding. I have been given 6 external 500GB hard drives for use on the project. It was more about whether the process of capturing everything first in DV, then later the bits I need as uncompressed was correct. I normally make very short films shot on DV so only have experience of working on-line so wanted to know whether the procedure I was using was OK or whether there was a better method I could adopt. From your response, it seems that I do need a raid storage system to do the online edit. However, is there a capture setting that is good enough quality (for DVD output) but uses less disc space?

best wishes,
m

[David Roth weiss]

Maria,

Personally, with hard drives so cheap these days, I would rather capture once at online resolution and be done with it. However, people have been using the offline/online paradigm for years. There are hazards in FCP, such as speed changes and the like, and you do need to use good logging procedures without using “special characters.” (see FCP manual excerpt below).

There’s a codec that can prove especially valuable for off-lining called Offline RT, which you might want to consider, as it only requires 1Gb per 40-mins of video. Here’s a good tutorial from Ken Stone to follow if you choose that method. https://www.kenstone.net/fcp_homepage/offline_rt.html

Avoiding Special Characters
The most conservative filenaming conventions provide the most cross-platform
compatibility. This means that your filenames will work in different operating systems, such as Windows, Mac OS X and other Unix operating systems, and Mac OS 9. You also need to consider filenaming when you transfer files via the Internet, where you can never be certain what computer platform your files may be stored on, even if temporarily. Most special characters should be avoided. Here are some suggested conservative filenaming guidelines for maximum cross-platform compatibility:

Avoid
File separators : (colon)
/ (forward-slash)
(backward-slash)
You cannot use colons (:) in the
names of files and folders
because Mac OS 9 (Classic) uses
this character to separate
directories in pathnames. In
addition, some applications may
not allow you to use slashes (/)
in the names of items.
These characters are directory
separators for Mac OS 9,
Mac OS X, and DOS (Windows)
respectively.
Special characters not included
in your native alphabet
? ?

David Roth Weiss
Director/Editor
David Weiss Productions, Inc.
Los Angeles

POST-PRODUCTION WITHOUT THE USUAL INSANITY ™

A forum host of Creative COW’s Apple Final Cut Pro, Business & Marketing, and Indie Film & Documentary forums.

[Andrew Kimery]

What about using ProRes? I agree w/David that working at ‘online’ resolution the whole time would be preferable to using an offline/online workflow if at all possible.

-Andrew

3.2GHz 8-core, FCP 6.0.4, 10.5.5
Blackmagic Multibridge Eclipse (6.8.1)