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Building an inexpensive arching workflow
I run a small boutique prod co. Most of the projects we work on are commercials, or online videos, almost all short form. We have one edit system with several 1tb external fw800 drives daisy chained.
I’m looking to create/redo my archiving workflow. I’ve got some ideas of what I think would work well for us but I wanted to get some feedback before I go through and move around files. This is the kind of thing I’d like to do only once=)
This is the workflow I am looking to implement is outlined below.
Active Drive – a 1tb G-RAID FW800. This is the drive I work off of and keep all my active projects on. All my media and project files live on this drive while a job is active
Project Archive Drive 01 – A 1TB G-tech FW800. This drives gets a copy of each final completed project, with all media and project files.
Project Archive Drive 01a – A 1TB Lacie quad. A Clone of Backup Drive 01.
Tape Archive 01 – 1TB Lacie quad. Used to keep backups of my p2 cards. We’re about 95% tapeless at this point. This drive also gets a copy of each completed jobs project files.All drives are daisy chained through FW800. I’m working on an Imac and that’s the fastest I’ve got.
As each archive drive gets filled, I’ll buy a new drive to replace the old, and give it a new number. Im sure as time goes on, I’ll be working with drives larger than 1TB, but for now, it’s a fine size and drives get so cheap every 6 months, I have found that it’s best to buy the storage when I need it, and not a year or 6 months before.
In FCP I set all my media file to go to a fcp media folder inside of the Project folder, and change this every time I change projects in FCP. I like that this keeps all my media from each project contained and orderly. That way, when a project is done, I can go back to the root project folder and move it around easily.
I used to media manage, but now as HD space is so cheap, it’s not worth it for me.
The only flaw for this system for me is that all my media will become unconnected every time I move it. We do a lot of animation and stop motion dealing with 1000’s of still images, and reconnecting them, even when organized well, is a complicated process, and 1 year down the line from a job, I don’t want to have to rely on myself to be able to connect every image again. Or worse, I (as the lead editor at the moment) don’t want to be the only person who knows to pull DSC0021.jpg from the hi_rez folder and no the lo_rez folder.
I’ve heard that if I name all my drives the exact same and mirror their structure, I can avoid this. All the media will still be connected. But will this lead to problems if ALL my drives are named the same thing? Will I still be able to daisy chain them or will it freak OS X out?
So does this seem like a good workflow? Does anyone have an suggestions or pointers before I jump into executing this? Thanks so much.
note: I know that archiving is a common situation and I assumed there to be more information about this in the forums. I searched around and couldn’t find anything specifically relevant to what I’m trying to do, Apologies if this is a retread.
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2 Replies
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Might work. I dunno, too much to read and I can’t imagine how you’d do this on a regular basis. Stop motion files cna be retained as still images separately from the image sequence media which can be backed up and relinked easily. You should not ever need to use the original photo files but they’re good to have aorund.
The concept of backing up and preserving mission critical information is not new. I(t can researched endlessly on the Net and from white papers from all of the manufacturers of backup software and drives. You’ve got to decide on the cost/benefit ratio of trying to do this yourself or just buying a turnkey system. Any archiving system that is too complicated to execute won’t get used and you will, at one point, need to perform a black start test to see if your process even works.
But backing up is meaningless if you don’t have an offsite copy and a hot site where you can upload and get back into business if your offices are destroyed or burglarized.
bogiesan
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Well what do other people do? I looked, and couldn’t find any workflows that made any sense that I could afford. Everything I saw involved expensive array systems (too much $) or burning to DVD or Blu-ray. Which are way to small for my needs.
You say there are endless white papers. Do you mind being specific and pointing to a few because I haven’t found them?
I don’t create image sequences. I keep all my still images as individual files and deal with them individually. I do a lot of frame by frame edits and tweaks and need access to each file, and the full res of them for much of my workflow. I know this is crazy to some of the editors on the cow, but for me, it works the best. But yes, I need to not just have access to all these original source files, but be able to reconnect them, which is the trickiest part about moving my media.
I got this work flow, adapted from a post house I did a job for. They had a San with 2 folders. Active projects and completed projects. When we finished an edit, we moved the job in to the completed folder, media and all. For me it has even more potential, I can buy cheaper, slower drives for my backups and use a faster me expensive drive for all my active work.
But I’ll come back, what are other people doing who don’t have raids? I’m not assuming my archiving process to be perfect, far from it. It’s just the best idea I had as a jumping off point.
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