What is your workflow for importing from SD-cards when you want to shoot additional footage?

[Samuel Neff]

Using SD cards that you’re actively shooting on as backups isn’t exactly a recommended workflow. It’s better to keep things separate. I would suggest buying a second hard drive to copy the files from the card to, freeing you up to format the card and continue shooting. There’s no stress that way over which files are which and whether you need the card still, etc.
Besides, when the card fills up, you’ll have to unload and format it anyway, making it an extremely temporary backup solution.

[Neil Redman]

I’m not using the SD-cards as my only backup, more as an added layer of safety. I copy the files to my harddisk and make a backup of it, but its nice to have that extra bit of safety. Generally I try to keep all my footage on the SD-cards until the editing is done and I’ll move on to the next project.

I’m afraid so, that what you are saying might be the best way, but it makes file organising really annoying. When I shoot I generally try to copy all the footage from the card as soon as I find some time for backup and if I do this often during the day I end up with a lot of “file structure folders” for my footage, and you can’t probably organize them.

Just for comparison here is what I would do if my camera would record single files:
– Shoot a few clips (say clips 1-10) -> copy on harddrive
– Keep shooting on card (11-20) -> copy clips on harddrive in same folder
– and so on…
– then afterwards maybe do a batch rename to the files and put them in folders (Day 1, Day 2, or Person A, Person B, etc.)

I’m guessing something like this is impossible to do?

[John-michael Seng-wheeler]

It’s not imposible, but it will be varying degrees of difficult depending on what format you’re shooting on and whether you’re downloading your footage using a Mac or PC.

Answer those questions and I’ll try and give you a workflow.

[Chris Tompkins]

Forget about it.

FORMAT THE CARD.

It’s the best way.
Shoot a bit, off-load, shoot a bit more, that’s a pain to keep straight.

Off-load all of card to hard drive. Back that up to a second hard drive.
Format card in cam for next shoot.
But, you should have more then 1 card too. So you could alternate and not shoot over the card you just used if you wanted to do that.

Chris Tompkins
Video Atlanta LLC

[Steve Brame]

We follow Chis’ method, except that as soon as I get a chance, I also back up all camera media to a Blu-Ray disc. Works beautifully!

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“98% of all computer issues can be solved by simply pressing ‘F1’.”
Steve Brame
creative illusions Productions

[Neil Redman]

[John-Michael Seng-Wheeler] “It’s not imposible, but it will be varying degrees of difficult depending on what format you’re shooting on and whether you’re downloading your footage using a Mac or PC.”

I’m shooting with a Panasonic GH2 and it records AVCHD on SD-Cards. While I’m currently on a Mac I’m about to make the switch to windows, so that would be the workflow I’m more interested in.

[Chris Tompkins] “Off-load all of card to hard drive. Back that up to a second hard drive.
Format card in cam for next shoot.”

When you do it this way, do you have a good way to organise your footage on your harddisk? Or do you you just keep it in folders, like Card A, Card B, Card C, etc.?

(Sorry for the little late reply)

[John-michael Seng-wheeler]

Easy question first:

[Neil Redman] “When you do it this way, do you have a good way to organise your footage on your harddisk? Or do you you just keep it in folders, like Card A, Card B, Card C, etc.?”

Basically yes. In my case the names of the folders for each card are reel numbers followed by a camera identifier.
I shoot with the Alexa so this is done for me by the camera. The files inside these folders are never touched after they come out of the camera. Any meddling might make for issues with conforming and relinking footage as projects are passed around.

Those folders are my reels. How they are sorted depends on the project and who the DIT is downloading the footage. On a simple scripted project it might be: Main Project Folder>Footage Sub Folder>Scene Sub Folder>Camera Sub Folder>Reel Folder>Video Files.

(Note the important fact that camera folder is the last thing before the reel. When you’re shooting multipal cameras keeping all the footage of a scene in one folder is necessary. If camera came before scene finding stuff would be much harder.)

We would never, ever, shoot more footage on a reel (card) after removing it from the camera.

However, if you must, it’s actually not all that hard to do with AVCHD on Windows.

Here’s the workflow I would use:

(I’ve worked this out from memory and a reference of the AVCHD file structure… I can’t find my little AVCHD camera at the moment to try with real footage. Before you try doing this with important footage, make sure you run a test, and set the erase protect switch on the card.
If anything goes wrong and the folder structure gets whacked, you can just delete everything and copy the card again from scratch.)

The first time around, create a Reel folder and copy the entire card. Inside your Reel folder you should have three folders: PRIVATE, DCIM and MISC.

The next time, you’ll need to do the copy in two steps.

First, open up both the Reel folder and the Card and navigate to the BDMV folder on each of them.

Copy and replace the INDEX.BDM and MOVIEOBJ.BDM with the newer ones from the card.

Then (this ONLY WORKS ON WINDOWS) go back to the reel folder and the top level of the card and copy the PRIVATE, DCIM and MISC into the reel folder again just as you did the first time. Windows will ask if you want to merge the contents of the folders. Say Yes, but first click the checkbox saying “apply to all further questions like this” or something like that. Then it will find a duplicate file and ask if you want to overwrite. Say No, again clicking the check box. This will copy only the files on the card that haven’t already been downloaded.

On Mac (at least on SL and before) It will ask you if you want to overwrite the folders, which is obviously not going to work. On Mac you will have to open each of the STREAM, CLIPINF and PLAYLIST folders and copy the files over. Just select all, copy them to the computer, and when it asks if you want to overwrite the existing files, click no.

One more point. If you’re using Premiere and only Premiere, it doesn’t need the whole structure of the card, just the BDMV folder, so you can forget step one, and you only need to copy the BDMV folder to your reel folder instead of the whole card. I don’t know how particular other programs are about having the rest of the folder structure.

I hope this all makes at least a little sense….

[Neil Redman]

Wow thank you so much, it all makes a lot of sense!

The workflow you described is pretty much what I used to be doing before. I didn’t know however that you only need the BDMV folder for Premiere so that is a big help as it will leave at least with a little bit less clutter. Anyways I think I’ll try sticking from now on to the workflow everyone has suggested by always using a new card/formatting it.

Maybe Adobe could adress these little issues by adding some features to Adobe Prelude that helps manage files in a situation like this? (I haven’t upgraded yet so I don’t know if it might already do something similar)

Anyways a big thank you to everyone that posted here!