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Tapeless workflow Q
The place I’m working at right now is looking at going tapeless (looking at both Panny P2 and Sony XDCAM HD solutions) and there is one workflow point I’m stuck on in terms of post. The vast majority of our shoots are ENG or EFP style covering video game conventions/events and our post workflow right now is we get the tape back, log it w/our particular naming conventions, capture it, and put the clips in their appropriate places on the xSan (there are 14 editors here that the media is shared between). A while ago we took an HVX200 out to cover an event as a test run and everything seemed to be going well until I go to import the footage into FCP and instead having a few tapes that I’ll log into probably a dozen or so chunks per tape I have 144 clips that need to get renamed. This put a rather large crimp in the faster-than-tape workflow we were hoping for. Not only did it take a while to rename all of the clips, but when working w/it in FCP there was a lot more clips to open and scrub thru when looking for b-roll. It just turned very cumbersome. I’d love to be able to select a group of clips and be able to import them as one big clip into FCP (assuming no TC breaks in the source clips of course) but there doesn’t seem to be a way to do that.
I’m curious as to how other people that have similar style shoots have adopted to going tapeless.
-A
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4 Replies
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Couple of thoughts.
I wouldn’t bother renaming. I sounds like you’ve already got a naming convention going, so I’d just adopt that to your current workflow.
As for the “too many clips”, try creating sequences of all clips based on some kind of logical break point (by hour? by day? by location). Then, you can log the sequence as if it was a complete tape. (You’re NOT gonna be able to “combine on import”.)
Since you’re on X-SAN, it should be relatively easy to organize your workflow around this.
My biggest concern about P2 is long term archiving. What’s your plan for that?Good luck.
Mark
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Mark makes a few very good points about skipping the renaming process. And dropping clips into a sequence to scrub more video. Also, you could use automator to help rename the clips, depending on the naming convention you use.
I actually find the P2 workflow easier, so I don’t have to constantly subclip, and I can delete clips I don’t need quickly and easily.
The only downside in an ENG/EFP scenario is being able to download the cards on site. But this all depends on how much you shoot, and how many cards you have available. We have 3x 8GB cards, which when shooting 720p, can run out quickly and need to be downloaded in the field.
As far as archiving, we are buying the largest available G-Technology FW400/800 G-Drives available at the time of purchase, and archiving to those.
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additional to the excellent selects reel method suggested by Mark for handling your imported clips, you should also take note of the new “continuous recording” feature of the F335/F355 XDCAM cameras … that allows you to pause and then continue recording without creating a new clip. for those working with tapeless formats, and looking to be able to imprt otherwise spearate clips as single entities, then this is a great new feature.
hopefully it will be something that will filter down to existing 330/350’s via a firmware upgrade -
Interesting idea about dropping the clips into a sequence and organizing like that. I’m not sure if it will work for us right now, but I’m definitely going to experiment w/it and keep it in mind for future application.
Because of better media shoot times and long term storage options we are leaning towards Sony’s XDCAM HD (and keeping a big eye on the new EX). I’m envisioning having enough 50min “long” memory cards to get thru the day then using a laptop to dump each card to it’s own XDCAM disc w/the XDCAM USB 2.0 drive. And if the footage needs to be sent back to the office for editing you just ship the disc via FedEX or UPS.
Something I’m really waiting for is Final Cut Server. If FCS will let us track our digital assets like I think it will then the need for giving the imported/catpture clips unique and very descriptive names (like e307_EA_intv_smith or halo3_x360_gp17_bossfight) won’t be as critical because we won’t be doing so much organizing at the Finder level.
Andy,
I saw your mention of the “continuous clip recording” over at dvinfo.net. I wonder if that will be a feature of the EX too?-A
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