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Folder Structure and File Naming
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Yes tape based was/is easier. FCP7 was not made (not much software is) for editing ‘clip’ based footage. I can’t stand it. Its incredibly unproductive to be sitting there double clicking footage to watch a 10 second clip.
Mostly when I am editing XDCAM EX I end up just making a timecode accurate play out of the entire cards clips. So basically i get one long say 50 minute clip (as you would get after ingesting a HDCAM tape.) I keep this native as XDCAM EX with the audio exactly the same as separate tracks. This really does not take long to do in FCP and makes editing as quick as you are currently doing it (as if it was off a tape). Of course it is completely backwards when you think about it.
Ideally Sonys XDCAM transfer would have an option to ‘link all clips’ with markers for shot change and any other metadata change that was previously recorded. I simply do not know how most editors work with a traditional tool like FCP7 and clip based footage, especially if they are working to tight turnarounds as I often do.
CatDV deals with xdcam very well with the MXF add on if you are keeping it all in its BPAV folder (as you should do).
Its just a shame that clip based is not really how our brains work or edit software works. I know that after I shoot for a day I have a vision of that days shoot as one long clip, so does the producer and the client. Thats how I remember it, thats how the FCP viewer deals with it and how we would all like to edit with it. I don’t think there is a usable solution yet to this but I may be wrong.
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I convert everything to a unified format anyway (ProRes). CatDV has an ability to combine clips, though I haven’t (yet) had occasion to use it. I know there are ways of stringing clips together from XD cam. Would make a lot of sense for what you’re doing, as part of the prep process.
Non-linear: all the time and nothing but.
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Yes it makes sense to do it as part of the edit prep for sure. Its just that keeping it as a BPAV folder for archive purposes is essential (too much to go into here).
I don’t convert to prores at that stage because of time constraints, mostly its not graded much so there is not much need when speed is of the essence. You only loose speed with xdcam if you are doing lots of effects in FCP. Going further off topic I just built a system to run Premier 5.5 with the mercury engine and a Cuda Nvidia card. 10 streams of HD prores / xdcam all scaled to fit on screen at once, all rotating, all with grading and effects. Playback full quality, full frame rate out to client monitor in real time with NO RENDERING. Unreal. Apple lost another pro..
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Well maybe it’s something the worker node can do—string together clips and save it as something useful.
I’ve been looking at Premiere as well, and even going back to Avid after 11 years away from it. I recently dropped Soundtrack Pro and adopted Pro Tools. Quite the learning curve, but what I need is robustness. I cannot afford to suffer all the crashes that STP gave me.
Non-linear: all the time and nothing but.
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If its the full pro package you are after check out the new version. I use audition a lot for audio and its great, so much more stable than STP. Check out the new colour grading tool in CS6:
https://blog.vincentlaforet.com/2012/04/15/adobe-production-premium-cs6/
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Yeah, I have to look at the new CS6. I’m not in much of a rush. I have a lot invested in FCS 3 systems and AJA cards and the like. Plus I’m really dependent on the integration between CatDV and FC 7. That really means more to me than anything else. That and keeping my HD deck running.
Non-linear: all the time and nothing but.
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I’m a one-man operation, learning about CatDV, here is my system, followed by a few further questions.
For in-studio work, I have a RAID and corresponding backup drive.
Otherwise I have a number of external drives, each duplicated. NTFS formatted. Drives tend to be client or purpose themed, rather than sequential “Archive” etc disks. Folder structure in each drive is:
_Media
_Library
_Projects
2012-04-24 (Acme) Charity Volunteer Day
010 Admin
020 Source
030 Projects
Adobe CS5.5
Intro 007.prproj
Vegas
WebVid 003 (Veg09).veg
040 Renders
100 Products
Web
DVD
Where:- [020 Source] contains subfolders for different scenes/cameras, music, foley etc.
- Dates are in reverse order and numbers have leading zeroes to allow simple text-based sorting
- “Acme” would be whatever client/company name. For personal projects the client is “Me”.
- Prefix numbers, there to provide for tidy sorting, jump in 10’s etc. to allow for possible future insertions (e.g. at “015”). Yes I was an old BASIC programmer…
- [_Projects] are greater-projects, as opposed to application-specific [Projects], which are really sub-projects, and for example in the above it may be that [Intro 007.prproj] in Adobe CS5.5 exports an intermediate Cineform file into [040 Renders] that then gets used in Vegas’s [WebVid 003 (Veg09).veg].
- Anything in [040 Renders] can be regenerated, and thus need not be archived. At project completion, the final products get moved into their appropriate subfolder of [100 Products], which is retained. The whole folder structure (possibly minus non-critical renders) is then considered (and recorded on spreadsheet) as archived.
Currently I record project locations on a spreadsheet. Sometimes it is necessary to temporarily store projects on one disk then move them subsequently (eg following acquisition of a new disk). Sometimes the disk letter assigned by Windows can get changed by Windows eg should that letter conflict with that of some other volume like a temporarily plugged-in memory stick or a new NAS that claims multiple letters. So I guess I also need a spreadsheet of disk letter assignments and a disk letter label on each disk.
It would be great if CatDV could track file changes eg movement (or apparent movement due to migration on/off the RAID, drive letter change, path (file and folder) name changes, project or file deletions etc. I suppose that CatDV could in principle track such changes efficiently if CatDV itself were used to make/manage such changes, as opposed to doing them externally via Explorer/Finder or backup software. Or does CatDV already have such media management capability?
Perhaps the Windows version ought to have an option save its own disk-identifying GUID (probably-unique random signature) to each volume (so it doesn’t have to rely on disk letters that can be unreliable and only number 26). Mac OS does this inherently of course. Also, why not have an index file/database just for that volume. Then any instance of CatDV (even on someone else’s computer) would be able to pick up the results and allow browsing etc straight away. Then there’s the cloud…
Or does it / will it do some of these things I have mentioned?
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Hey guys, just back from my post-nab vacation. (much needed.)
In the end, the more metadata in the file and folder names the better, of course but as has been discussed the most important thing is that there is a structure at all.
Folder and filenames mostly need to be unique, that’s important and harder to do as you grow larger. A lot of DAM’s actually rename the asset to have a GUID as the name and so you don’t even have a record of the filename. (This is done to guarantee unique names.) I hate this but that shows you how seriously some people take the db. In fact, a lot of heavy database folks would shudder at the idea that we use the actual user given file name.
We are not generally in that world. I find that for most shops, a date based system works fine. Year/Month/Day and then go from there.
However, if you don’t do a lot of projects and you actually work on a project basis, (let’s say more than one a week) as opposed to say news or stock footage, you can pretty much do what you like since you’re talking about 50 project folders.
Depending on the size of your operation, you can choose your way. I find that humans are remarkable in their ability to remember things. If it’s your data. But… if it needs to be handed off to other folks for the future, do yourself a favor and add some metadata to your filenames and folder names.
Oh, have you seen Focal Point? 😉
bryson
bryson “at” hidefcowboy.com
hidefcowboy.com
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Welcome back to reality Bryson 😉
Glad to have your input, and its reassuring I am on the right track with the importance o folder and file metadata. I can see big shops needing individual file names, it makes sense but for anyone smaller a simpler system with CatDV doing all the heavy lifting should not run into too many problems. If anything the media folder seems to be a useful way to divide content up, especially when dealing with clip based tapeless media. So date, country, location, two word description etc
Does CatDV have a way of generating a continuos number? for example if I wanted to have a field for a unique asset set number (I am thinking of using the Reel field for integration into FCP).
So lets say I have a shoot on XDCAM EX or P2. I could take a cards worth of data and give it a number 1088 in the reel field (or similar user created one). Is there a way that when I come to do the next cards worth of clips I can go to that metadata filed and CatDV will auto prompt the next number in the sequence? I can probably see this manually using the drop down I was just wondering if it has an intelligent way of controlling those numbers?
Scott
Néo Vérité Limited
http://www.neoverite.com -
I always like to have human-readable data. Numbers don’t do much for me unless there’s text to give it context.
Non-linear: all the time and nothing but.
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