Media Management – Beating a dead horse?

[Jeremy Garchow]

We’ve been keeping everything from an edit for a long time. The archive storage adds up, but so what. If your archive is worth it, it’s worth it.

We have also moved to LTO, but that’s completely different. If you were thinking LTO, you’d go LTO.

Some other things to keep in mind when archiving in X. In my opinion, X does some very cool things when making high and low res proxies. If you’re footage is not .mov originally (so DSLR, or Arri Alexa), then a some point you will be able to “retransfer” the camera original footage. This will save you a lot of space. What formats do you typically deal with?

So, if the camera original footage is part of your archive, you can trash the low quality and high quality media, and of course trash all the numerous render files in both the Project and Event. Upon restoring, FCPX would have to recreate the hi res files.

If your footage is .mov originated, you can trash the high, low, and original quality media folders. Upon restore, you drag the originals back the original media folder in the event, and launch fcpx.

Make sure you test, and test well, with dupes of everything. Fcpx does great things, but reconnect media is a new process in fcpx. Make sure you test potential pitfalls.

The easiest thing to do is delete your render files in Project and Event, quit fcpx, and archive the entire Event and Project folders that correspond to your current job. That would definitely be the safest in this stage of the game until Apple decides a more robust and fully featured trim to archive solution is needed.

Jeremy

[Tangier Clarke]

Jeremy, I don’t have LTO capabilities, but my archiving strategy is otherwise similar (with FCP 7):

– archive the camera cards (mostly AVCHD from an AF-100, some P2, GH1 cams, and Sony BPAV folders)
– Edit program, media manage final edit and archive that (which is the only transcoder content to get archived from the edit)
– Archive FCP project and XML version of entire project
– Archive any content not from principal photography (stills, archival footage, other formats, etc).

with FCP X it looks like I just won’t have a media managed version for archiving, or rather it can, it’ll just be much larger than I need. I may just keep the texted/ textless quick times and the camera raw archives and re-transcode as needed (as you described).

BTW

Thank you everyone for this discussion. It’s the most If gotten since I started posting after FCP X came out.

Tangier

[Jeremy Garchow]

[Tangier Clarke] “- archive the camera cards (mostly AVCHD from an AF-100, some P2, GH1 cams, and Sony BPAV folders)”

So all of those will be able to be “retransferred”.

[Tangier Clarke] “- Archive any content not from principal photography (stills, archival footage, other formats, etc).”

This is also where FCPX gets interesting. When you import media to FCPX, you have a choice on whether to bring it in to the Event or not when you import. If you do not import it in to the Event, it remains outside of the Event in it’s original location and an alias gets created that points to the original file, and that alias lives in the “Original Media” folder.

You can choose to “Organize” Projects and Events. This will bring any disparate media in to the Event folders, which is very handy.

If you want my honest opinion, I would archive the entire Event and Project folder (except the render files) as FCPX does not have really awesome connections to the outlying media at this point in time. In short, pony up for more hard drives. It’s just not worth risking consolidating media when FCPX can’t really handle it at the moment, at least not without a lot of manual hand holding.

For instance, if you have an AVCHD card stored on your media drive, and you import that file into the Event and it’s transcoded/rewrapped, you now have a QT movie in the Event structure.

You edit your piece, you delete all media, archive to a different drive (for which FCPX does have pretty decent “move” commands). Then it comes time to restore.

You drag the Event and Project folders back to your main hard drive, and you go to “reimport camera/archive”. FCPX will tell you that the media isn’t connected. Unless the original media has remained in the exact same directory, FCPX won’t ask you where it is. So you have to open the import window, hopefully know where the directories are and add them, close the import window, then choose File > Import > Reimport…

The big problem with this is that FCPX doesn’t necessarily tell you exactly where this footage came from. In the Browser and the inspector, it will give you the name of the originating folder, which does help a lot, but it’s not a very exact science.

So, it’s not a fully automagic process.

Test, test, test, and sorry if any of this sounds confusing. I will gladly clarify if you need it.

It’s much easier (safer) to simply archive the entire corresponding Event and Project folder(s), in my opinion, anyway.

Jeremy

[Eric Strand]

I think the point that Craig is making regarding shorter clips vs capturing entire tapes is one that is overlooked and not talked about enough. It makes it a huge pain in the ass having to figure out how to log and store both shorter clips from DSLR cameras, with no TC, and material captured from tape. We just started using CatDV here and we still largely shoot DVCPROHD tape. At the same time, we just received about 15,000 P2 clips from a client, some of which are native off the camera, some of which have been combined into 2 hour clips. When you subclip the two hour clips in CatDV, you get files with names ######.01, ######.02, but that references that 2 hour clip, which of course confuses producers. I think when we talk about media management, whether it be FCPX or CatDV, short clips off of cards and long captures from tapes is a larger issue than people realize (not you guys here, I’m saying in general)

[Jeremy Garchow]

[Eric Strand] “with no TC,”

Come on, dude. It’s 2012. Who the hell needs tc and reel number? That’s, like, so 1995.

Just kidding.

[Eric Strand] ” I think when we talk about media management, whether it be FCPX or CatDV, short clips off of cards and long captures from tapes is a larger issue than people realize (not you guys here, I’m saying in general)”

I actually have a huge affinity for P2’s implementation of the MXF standard, but I am also a huge nerd. The fact that’s it’s op-atom (separate audio and video files) does make it more complex, but in my opinion, they have done a really nice job of trying to keep a really complex idea (the footage has to work everywhere on every OS, file size limitations included) and op-atom made the most sense.

P2 also has a very extensive metadata structure that allows the metadata to control the file very well, including any markers directly to the metadata file. A potential problem is that if you lose that XML file, the metadata is gone, but since the file exists outside of the coded essence, it’s very easy to edit/resave. There are tradeoffs to be made everywhere.

P2 should not be used with the given names, in my opinion, but should be used with the metadata names (also known as User Clip Names) which makes things a lot more “human readable” and therefore easier to use. CatDV should be able to read these no problem, just not sure if it’s able to write that information back to the P2 XML.

Jeremy

[Eric Strand]

I totally agree about P2, I’m not saying I prefer one or the other. I just meant I’d be happy if all our footage was DSLR or P2 stuff, like single, one minute clips. (Obviously, it’s beyonod our control as it gets shipped to us.) It gets messy and annoying trying to log and then archive when you add in half hour or 2 hour videos comprised of an interview, b-roll, another interview, some backplates. Now you have a mixture of subclips that have been transcoded, native files, everything has different names, half with TC, half not…ah! But that’s the world we live in now so…

[Keith Douglas]

Is there a simple way to move the files from one computer to another and have the files relink. I can’t seem to get that to work on either of my macs?

[Jeremy Garchow]

[Keith Douglas] “Is there a simple way to move the files from one computer to another and have the files relink. I can’t seem to get that to work on either of my macs?”

Yes.

In this case, you would select the Projects in the Project library, then choose to “Duplicate” (command-d).

Choose Duplicate Project and Referenced Events and choose another disk drive from the drop down.

Is that what you mean?

Jeremy