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Reality show
I’m designing a post workflow for a reality show. Well, actually we think of it as a documentary TV series. In any case, we’ll have 3 crews shooting about 60-75 hours a week in 8 week modules. I like the Sony EX camera, but I’m concerned about workflow using memory cards as capture media.
If I dump everything from cards to (say LaCie 1T) hard drives at full rez, can I then load select material onto Xserve (or similar) at a lower resolution? Then dig the final sequence from the hard drive “originals” for finish?
Seems like a lot of schlepping media to me.
Or am I crazy and I should just shoot to a tape or disk format?
Help from anyone with specific experience with this problem would be greatly appreciated.
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7 Replies
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Bob,
My best advice to you is to just buy a mountain of storage. Forget up rez, down rez, moving files around. If you just have a big bucket, you can throw it all in and never worry about media management.
I’ve done a lot of reality shows and trust me when I say, you can NEVER have a big enough bucket. Estimate what you think you may need and TRIPLE it! You also REALLY want to avoid the “uprez” later workflow. Deadlines are becoming shorter and shorter, and there are constant needs for high rez material in advance of picture lock (PROMOS?). So, the off-line to on-line workflow is really a hinderance. Yes, we still use it, but we’re trying to get away from it every chance we get.
Good luck.
Mark
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What Mark says.
Also, if shooting with the ex1, isn’t the footage 35mbits/sec? Considering dv is 25mbits/sec there’s not much of a size difference.
Jeremy
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This is really helpful. So, something like a GMax array? As a former film cutter, CMX, Edge, Avid, etc etc etc editor, it still make me nervous having no “hard” copy of ftg. Would you back things up to other drives? Or just live dangerously?
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[Bob Schneiger] “it still make me nervous having no “hard” copy of ftg.”
Welcome to the world of tapeless. Well, there’s number of ways to safely do this.
1) Get a quantum LTO tape drive. Safe, reliable and expensive. MXF aware so metadata stays in tact.
2) Get an expensive redundant array to store your footage. Safe, reliable, expensive and finite. Meaning it will fill up.
3) Get a cheap 2 drive enclosure (I like the 2 drive firmtek enclosure, but there are others) and configure it for raid1 (which is a mirrored array). That means, drag and drop once, copy twice. The data gets copied simultaneously to both drives at the same time. That way you can send one drive to a secured vault somewhere and keep the other drive for working on.
Jeremy
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>would you back things up to other drives? Or just live dangerously?
I would never live dangerously if my contract stipulated I was not going to paid if I could not deliver the shows. Backing up is an essential part of any workflow that involves large amounts of money and brickwall deadlines. Your rig must include nto only backing up your project files and backup copies of your prebuilt resources (graphics and animations and such), you must know how you can rebuild your show in the shortest amount of time in a worst case scenario such as theft or fire.
Your insurance needs to cover your possible monetary losses as wells as your contractual obligations. Living dangerously is how your competition undercuts your bids.
bogiesan
This is my standard sigfile so do not take it personally: “For crying out loud, read the freakin’ manual.”
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I was just kidding about living dangerously. I wear a belt and suspenders. Now I guess it’s time to go bucket shopping…
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[Bob Schneiger] “I was just kidding about living dangerously. I wear a belt and suspenders. Now I guess it’s time to go bucket shopping…
“Ha! Good one.
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