Workflow and best practise for projects

[Juan Salvo]

How much footage do you have… in time. Hard to say if you did something wrong if we don’t know how many hour? minutes? days? of footage you have.

[Chris Shaw]

I have roughly about 3 hours worth of footage. Its basically a series of interviews.

Thanks

Chris

Motion graphics – Animation – Video

http://www.shaw-media.co.uk

[Jack Guthrey]

3 hours at ProRes 220 would be around 300GB. Since you said “Project Folder” I’m guessing that 500GB number includes audio, renders, etc. so that seems easily feasible.

When you saw “Raw” from the camera do you mean the native h.264 files? That should only save around 50GB if it’s just video.

After the project is over, you don’t really need to keep the ProRes as it’s just a better copy of the native h.264s. I’d keep those as your “master clips” which you can transcode later if there needs to be any adjustments.

[Juan Salvo]

3 hours of ProRes HQ @ 1080/23.98 should be about 250GB so maybe you have your media doubled up? If you’d set your conversion to prores 4444 it would be able 360GB plus the original files i’m guessing around 120gb… would add up to half a terabyte? In anycase 500GB for a 3hour project is within the realm of reason.

In terms of long term storage. Hard drive space is cheap, time is valuable. Buy an external hard drive and backup the whole thing.

[Chris Shaw]

Thanks Jack and Juan some good points there. Yeah you’re right I was including the whole project.

I think once the video is signed off deleting the ProRes files is possibly the best route. Then if I need to do any edits in the future I can just transcode the files again.

Thanks guys

Chris

Motion graphics – Animation – Video

http://www.shaw-media.co.uk

[Joseph Hung]

ProRes is a higher quality codec (requiring higher bitrates, so bigger sizes) than the very compressed native H.264 straight out of the camera, so everyone is correct, your file sizes are within reason.
What I do for the short term is media manage the locked edits so that I’m only keeping the parts of ProRes clips I actually used in the edits (including all other media used), you can add handles if you like, or choose to keep the entire clip instead of deleting parts not used, whatever makes you comfortable, and save that as it’s own new project, for each video. Move this to the external for safe keeping, INCLUDING, and you should always do this for acquisition workflows anyways, the entire native H.264 footage, because this is your “rawest” footage. This way, in the short term if the client comes back, you have the edits ready to go and your project’s linked media already exists and you haven’t unlinked anything. And if you need to add anything, you can pick and choose, or transcode all, of the H.264 clips as you need to. This will save you time and effort later on. When a good amount of time passes and it’s obvious the client isn’t coming back, then you can keep the project and H.264 files and delete all of the ProRes clips, thereby unlinking them in the project. However the problem with this is if you gave the ProRes special logging info in the transcoding process then you will have to replicate that later in order to relink efficiently. I only do this if I REALLY need to save space. Media managing will save you some space already, H.264 doesn’t take up that much space, and in most cases I can hold on to the media managed ProRes files because like Juan says, HDD is cheap these days. In Media Manager, it will show you the space differences between keeping all the media as oppose to managed media. And you can customize to your needs.

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[Shane Ross]

You really should be using Log and Transfer to do this conversion. Here’s the workflow for that:

Tapeless Workflow for FCP 7 Tutorial

Shane
Little Frog Post
Read my blog, Little Frog in High Def

[Emiliano Rodriguez]

Hi, maybe I can find here the answer I was looking for. My externals HDD are going out of space and Im trying to choose the best way to archive the projects. I mostly shoot on a canon T2i, then log and transfer to ProRes LT in final cut pro 7.

Now, I have a lot of projects to archive. I was going to delete the prores files and preserve the originals h.264, but I did a little test and now im not sure if im doing everything ok. What I did was move the prores files to another location to unlink that files. Then I choose one of the original clips and converted it again to prores. When I tried to reconnect media in the project the warning message about the attributes came up. I dont see that as a big problem. But what makes me doubt is that if I choose reconnet media from the timeline, the clips reconnect in the timeline but not in the browser. if I choose reconnet media from the browser, the clips reconnect in the browser but not in the timeline.

So, thsese are my questions:

1- If i want to preserve only the originals h.264 files and delete the prores files, wich is the best way to do that?
2- If I do that and someday I want to work again on a project archived in that way, what I should do?