Old Projects

[Mike Velte]

External USB/Firewire drive. 1 TB for about $160 at Sam’s.

[Mike Cohen]

use the project manager function to make a new project folder for each project, thus eliminating all the unused footage, which from a wedding can be a lot. The bride is unlikely to say “can you put back in a shot of my dad passing out.” Then as Mike said save these to a hard drive.

[Curt Thackeray]

Thanks Guys, for responding!.. Ummm… I already have a terabyte drive.. that’s the thing that’s filling up.. and the reason that my company tells me to keep this stuff around, is because they actually HAVE had clients tell them they want different shots.. different music.. or whathaveyou..

My boss wants me to burn everything to tape.. thus keeping the original non-compressed video.. which would be fine.. except, most weddings that we deal with are over two hours long.. that’s at least two tapes per project.. more like three..

I just don’t have room in my house to store a billion tapes over time.. I’ve been to my boss’ house.. (you can barely walk around in his office..) So I was trying to think of a way to digitally retain them..

I will try the project manager and see how much space I can reclaim..

Thanks again!!

[Jon Barrie]

Curt. Please stop and listen closely.

We understand the stress of this kind of situation. It sounds like your employer is old-school and doesn’t really understand that going back to tape doesn’t really keep quality and is no good if you have cross fades or effects on shots that the client wants to replace, because the effects and transitions are locked in. you have to find the original tape it was recorded on and replace all and any associated clips with the transition to the ‘new’ one and you need to match the effects, colour corrections etc that were applied to match the other shots.

There are too ways to do this. The easiest by far is the most obvious.

1. Buy another TB harddrive. Start working on your new projects with this drive. Or, copy older stuff without removing anything to the new drive and name the drive backup. Then delete the older stuff from the original drive. It’s a longer process and you’ll need to defrag the original drive.

2. Make a full quality (not recompressed DV i guess) final export of the entire project as a reference. Then, provided you have the original tapes of all the footage, timecode was never broken and the tape names were labeled and logged properly on capture you can delete the captured files, which are the bulk of any project size. The project files will remain in tact and have all the effects/transitions and shots used when and where it just need to recapture. If there are several shots that need replacing open the project. All clips will be offline. Import and lay down the reference clip above the edit. Pin point the parts they want changed. Find those shots and recapture just those bits and the surrounding clips for transitions. All recaptured offline versions will update and use them in the timeline as they were affected with any effects/transitions. Then copy the part/s from the edited bit that need replacing and paste them on top of the ref file. Effectively you’re replacing just the bits that needed it. Reexport for final DVD.
The problem with this method is that you can’t find the replacing shot without having to recapture that whole part of the tape to see it and find it.

I would go with option 1.

Jon Barrie
aJBprods
http://www.jonbarrie.net