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FCPX Projects and Events disappear as fcpx opens
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I don’t like Camera Archives because nothing else can read them.
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Could Premiere read them?
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[Bret Williams] “Could Premiere read them?
“Nope nothing else will read them.
Sure you can open the Finder, but in order to use the media inside them anywhere else, you’d have to drag them out of the archive.
If you work in an insular FCPX world, they are fine, if not, “good luck” as Mr Incredible says.
For my work, I don’t like them.
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[Andy Branner] “Erm… yeah… which was exactly my point? Don’t use the Finder. And there was never any talk of some DIT’s, so let’s not shift the goal posts. Aside from the fact that the DIT on a Showtime pilot I recently worked on did exactly that with the F55 cards he was given. But hey, if aaaall those DIT’s that you’ve worked with did something way better/safer, then… do whatever they did??”
The fact that you PA’d on a Showtime pilot with a DIT who was apparently taking a huge risk doesn’t mean anything.
I DIT, and there’s no way in hell I would use Finder for copies. I use a bash script that does a checksum verified copy to multiple drives. Anything less than that is being foolish with your data. I have encountered situations where the checksums don’t match even though the copy was fine, and the resulting video had hard-to-spot artifacting. Finder would not have alerted you to this.
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I move a lot of data around from various formats of hard drives and a several OSes.
The Finder is fine, and transfers are secure, the problem is if a copy fails for whatever reason it doesn’t tell you what file failed, therefore, you have to do the transfer again.
Last week, I had a 12TB transfer.
I used Shotput Pro to do it. Everything transferred fine over the course of 50 hours, except for six tiff files totaling 400MBs or so.
If I was using the Finder, I would have had to do all 12TB for 6 tiff files.
Shotput Pro told me exactly what didn’t transfer and I was able to solve the problem without a 12TB redo, and it saved me a bunch of time. That’s my only issue with Finder transfers, I realize it’s an extreme case, but this happens to me a lot.
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[Steve Connor] “It isn’t an issue for me, I’m just interested in best practices for backing up footage and ALL the data wranglers I have worked with don’t use the finder.”
I ingest footage quite often, so here are some different ways.
For all of my personal stuff, I just copy straight off the card, either in Windows or OSX. Create a folder that is properly named, and drag the entire contents of the card (for AVCHD, say, it’s the PRIVATE folder into that folder, for P2 its’ CONTENTS and LASTCLIP.TXT, ect. ect). Whatever that card looks like when you click on it to see the files and folders on it, I duplicate that entirely on the drive I am copying to.
Use Disk Utility to make a .DMG of the entire contents of the card. This also ensures an exact file structure. Though I am leery of single-file archives, because if something goes bad, you can lose everything in it as opposed to a handful of files.
For jobs where it is imperative that I can verify a correct copy, I use this utility. It’s basic, but works great, and gives you checksum logs.
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I figured as much. I’m not much of a fan of disk images either. I like being able to browse and search projects in the finder myself. But of course I can see how either might be of use to someone else and their workflow.
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[Jeremy Garchow] “Shotput Pro told me exactly what didn’t transfer and I was able to solve the problem without a 12TB redo, and it saved me a bunch of time. That’s my only issue with Finder transfers, I realize it’s an extreme case, but this happens to me a lot.”
Yeah, for full disclosure, I use Finder a lot too. Never on a paid job where money is on the line, definitely not for anything DIT related. But that is a good point about Finder copies, though I haven’t had one mess up on me, mostly because I careful purchase gear and drives. With paid jobs, you never really know what kind of drive a client will show up with (one had a single striped RAID enclosure for a very expensive shoot).
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[Bret Williams] ” I figured as much. I’m not much of a fan of disk images either. I like being able to browse and search projects in the finder myself. But of course I can see how either might be of use to someone else and their workflow.”
The other thing is that if a single archive file gets damaged, the entire contents are unusable. If it’s just the camera’s file/folder structure on the job, you may be able to recover a majority of the content.
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[Gary Huff] “But that is a good point about Finder copies, though I haven’t had one mess up on me, mostly because I careful purchase gear and drives. “
I’m sorry. I didn’t mean to infer that finder bombs out on me a lot, it’s generally reliable, I meant to infer that I do large transfers a lot, and the shotput pro logs have saved me a few times.
We also have a more complicated system than a few local hard drives, again it’s an extreme case.
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