Media Management – Beating a dead horse?

[Craig Seeman]

[Tangier Clarke] “I am asking you all, based on your media management experiences with FCP X, am I beating a dead horse?”

The horse is not dead. It’s a foal, not yet grown.

[Tangier Clarke] “FCP X does not: Have a means to gather PORTIONS of clips (to my knowledge). The “Duplicate Project + used Clips Only” take PORTIONS of clips.”

I can only speculate that thinking was that clips, with their frequent stopping and starting, would be much shorter lengths than the old method of capturing entire tapes. There are many of us though, that must keep the camera running for long periods to get those precious few seconds to use in a piece.

Given that FCPX is a metadata manager it can’t simply slice and dice the way FCP7 media manager worked. There’s a lot of master metadata that must be preserved and, when Apple is able to extract that and place it into smaller preserved portions, is when we’ll see this feature in FCPX.

Since you’ve brought up cost, in the grand scheme of things, the cost per gigabyte of hard drives is fairly low. Of course I would not consider hard drives an archival medium.

[Tangier Clarke]

I would prefer DLT tape or something similar, but we haven’t supported that option yet. What do you archive to?

Tangier

[Tangier Clarke]

Found an error in my post above. I meant The “Duplicate Project + used Clips Only” does not take PORTIONS of clips.

Tangier

[Bill Davis]

Hi Tangier,

I think I understand what you’re trying to do and here are my thoughts. (Pardon me if it’s got it wrong.)

The old system of “reduce data to be able to store it more efficiently” is not really the main game we’re moving towards with products like FCP-X.

Storage capacity keeps growing and cheaply. So do data access and delivery speeds. So building capabilities to truncate data is less valuable than building systems that easily access more data more rapidly.

This is the world FCP-X is built for. It values the capacity to deal with more “always available” libraries, rather than designing a system that works best when it’s users “truncate” the pool of available footage to make access easier.

X is deigned to ingest clips directly into it’s centralized search and sort system (the event browser), and they’ve bolted that onto an export “back-end.” Each of these becomes MORE powerful the more data you can keep in the middle. So the game is not to have the users try to LIMIT the data stored in the middle, but to make it easier and easier for them to store and access MORE.

So what you’re dealing with is the fact that you’re concerned with how to work smart to deal with scarcity (a limited storage pool) in an industry that’s solving that problem rapidly with access to more and more cheap rapid-access storage.

I just went to the local computer store yesterday to replace a $450 portable Firewire 800 drive that I use for road editing, and bought two 750 gig drives for just over $300. They’re smaller, faster, and cheaper this year than last. And they let me easily travel with ALL my footage for ALL my projects – so that interim steps built into the program to help me cut down the “whole pool” of my footage to “travel size” simply isn’t very important to me any more.

Looked at it one way, trying to “truncate” your data pool for efficiency might be less wise than looking for ways to expand the overall data in your system to keep more of it “on line” all the time – so that a tool like FCP-X can present you with access to more choices from across all your projects if and when you want to assemble something new.

Just more of Apples “new thinking” that might look like a limitation at first, but starts to look like a better overall plan the more you consider it.

I know that doesn’t solve your particular need. Just a look at maybe “why” they didn’t make “subset export” a particular priority. It’s not consistent with the way the whole of editing may be moving – which in my thinking is to try to provide tools that let you access and work with more available data – rather than force you to think about how to work better with less.

FWIW.

“Before speaking out ask yourself whether your words are true, whether they are respectful and whether they are needed in our civil discussions.”-Justice O’Connor

[Tangier Clarke]

Thanks for that Bill. I recognized that direction too and completely agree with your assessment; appreciate the simple explanation as well. In the long wrong it is cheaper to have more content more readily available and I’m all for shared online storage and access to media 24/7 that I can mobilize too as you did. Despite it’s faults I miss Final Cut Server.

Perhaps this is just one of those situations where FCP X is so forward thinking (as we’ve all experienced in one way shape or form) that media management in FCP X doesn’t address that efficient storage model I am looking for and you described so well. Drives are cheap, getting cheaper, however storing the transcoder media (all of let’s say) would skyrocket are costs and we’d have to have systems in place to manage all of that; we’d need large array bays just to have enough drive slots to have all of the media available, etc. etc.

Some of never had that luxury with FCS and still don’t with FCP X (as I look at my dusty Xserve RAID next to me).

i guess I better get on board, open the wallet and accept (knowingly) that this is the way everything is moving. Though media management a la FCP 7 is something I think is valuable even in the age of cheaper endless storage.

Thanks a lot!

Tangier

[Mark Morache]

I would wager a guess that some intrepid coder would come up with an app for that.

I recall from my avid days, there was a way to send a timeline into a process where all the material used in the timeline would go into another timeline that could be put to tape, with the original timeline relinked to the new material. This meant that reviving a project was as simple as opening the new project, digitizing the new compile tape, and presto.

It seems to me that someone could write a routine that would do the same sort of thing, perhaps creating a timeline full of your used material that you could export and a new project relinked to the material.

I don’t expect Apple to do this. I’d love to have it be a part of the software, however having third parties produce it makes sense as well. They will work faster and probably harder to keep us happy.

As for archiving, if seems that if you keep copies of your original cards, you should be able to resurrect your projects and events from those, without the need to keep all that extra media.

I always used the consolidate function in legacy FCP to create a copy of all the media with handles, but that was mostly when I was shooting on tape, and could easily re-ingest footage from the tapes. I don’t do that anymore.

Even with the tsunami, hard drives are relatively inexpensive. A 2tb drive will hold quite a bit of footage. I use the Newertech Voyager and raw hard drives to store my projects. I keep a clone of the backup on a second drive for safety, and I pass the cost to the client.

———
Don’t live your life in a secondary storyline.

Mark Morache
FCPX/FCP7/Xpri/Avid
Evening Magazine,Seattle, WA
https://fcpx.wordpress.com

[Jeff Greenberg]

[Tangier Clarke] ” FCP X does not: Have a means to gather PORTIONS of clips (to my knowledge). The “Duplicate Project + used Clips Only” take PORTIONS of clips.”

This is because (a guess, of course) that since FCPX works with native (and transcoded) material, it doesn’t know how to appropriate lop off part of a GOP structure. It’s far safer (and zero damage) to just take all the necessary raw media to preserve quality.

[Tangier Clarke] ” Perhaps most of you have (whether personal or for you company) endless cash to buy hard drives as need and the infrastructure (software and personnel) to maintain the contents of those drives”

Now, this is closer to the real issue. Build the archival cost into the cost of a project as a line item. Two hard drives are good. Tape is better.

There’s the “Good, fast, cheap” rule, pick two…I’ve worked in post where they archive off the HD uncompressed that was used (at 6 gigs/min.) So, $100 for a TB HD doesn’t look like much (or $200 if you buy two.)

If you’re being hamstrung by your employer, I’d suggest figuring out how much time you’re wasting in the archival end and show how quickly that money adds up.

As to search/find – solutions like CatDV make low res MP4 copies of the media for you to search. There are other tools, but that scales pretty well.

Best,

Jeff I. Greenberg
Editor/Author/Speaker/Consulting
My NAB seminar schedule, contact info and more

[Chris Harlan]

[Tangier Clarke] “i guess I better get on board, open the wallet and accept (knowingly) that this is the way everything is moving. Though media management a la FCP 7 is something I think is valuable even in the age of cheaper endless storage.”

I agree with you. I’ve gotten a lot of use with FCP 7.s media manager. It is a ver easy way for me to back up projects.

[Claude Lyneis]

I agree hard drives are cheap and a $100 for a TByte is only 10 cent per gigabyte. However, with my new iMac 27″ and a couple of WD firewire drives daisy chained together, each with some FCPX event files on them I had a series of the disks getting the directories damaged and then the disk would not show up. The Apple Disk utility said reformat, Disk Warrior was able to repair them and sort out the overlapping files. Then I went to only one external disk and the problem has not reoccurred.

Has anyone else had difficulty with corrupted disks using FCPX, daisy chained FW 800 disks with event files stored on both external disks?

[John Heagy]

One way to approach the problem is to segment your footage into discreet selects after FCPX transcodes everything and re-import. Take interviews: You would make selects of every question/answer. With your footage in smaller “chunks” FCPX MM becomes more efficient. It also speeds restore.

John Heagy