[Jacob Holcomb]

Thanks guys. Both great answers and right in time, too. Got the green light and have been pulling in new footage for the past several days without a set workflow, but the really exciting stuff is coming up so it’s not too late.

The EditReady looks like a key component for keeping space use to a minimum. That was a big help in trying to figure out the backup puzzle with camera archives vs libraries. Etc. My brain is fried and I have to get back to the action. I’ll double check with you before I order.

[Jacob Holcomb]

Thanks for the reply and next time I’ll start my own topic. It seemed like jerry punched out and I wanted to keep the momentum of good advice and insight going.

I followed that link and bought a few of those Ripple trainings at discount. Well you weren’t kidding. Straight up useful right from the get-go. I have a free Lynda subscription from my job and it’s been very valuable, but the Ripple trainings are in another league.

Also thanks for pointing out the advantages of not dumping everything in a single library for larger projects. Keeping the archives separate will definitely allow me to save money on the RAID and help things moving fast.

It’s amazing how much better these tools are now than just a few years ago. Maybe having my hackintosh blow up and skipping out on 10.0-10.2 was a blessing in disguise.

[Jacob Holcomb]

Loving the feedback here. I’ve been watching several videos on Lynda and youtube trying to figure out how I’m going to update an old project from FCP7 and have yet to come across the philosophical conversation about moving away from folders like you guys covered it.

Background: 10 yo documentary that I took a break from to do some soul searching and financially stabilize but now am ready to finish. My organization methods were chronological folders, but there were too many containers and it was way too easy to get lost and waste lots to time digging for stuff. On the original project I had everything bumped up to 422 because that’s the way I was used to working on weddings, but there was something wrong with the transcoding settings, too much storage space wasted (multiple separate drives), and I forgot most of what’s in there so will have to go through the footage all over again anyway.

Instead of updating my old project and trying to untangle the nightmare and contaminate my enthusiasm with the previous terrible rough cut, I’d like to just re-import the camera files into a single RAID and use the proxy editing workflow along with Fcx’s more intuitive metadata tools.

The way I was doing it before was to double back-up the camera files on external drives (date naming convention) and then transcode and keep only the Prores on the system. Obviously the best way to do it is to keep both the camera files and the proxy media on the RAID so you can export in high quality any time you like and be ready to collaborate much more easily.

I’d like to keep the date-naming folder convention in the backup drives (with subfolders for A-cam, B-cam, stills, audio, etc.) but I’m not sure how that would translate on import. It sounds like FCX dumps imports into a giant Library pile and then we sort it out in the program using various methods.

Also as far as FCX structure, I’m thinking a single Library for the entire movie and then creating/naming Events after the major events that happened (and also giving them a date in the name to keep them sorted). Then I can make separate stand-alone timelines for each event that independently tell little pieces of the story, and later assemble them in a Master Event/Timeline where I can start killing off my darlings.

There will be some new footage coming in as well, but I’m trying to get my head around what’s there and get those ducks in a row before doing final interviews and possibly taking one last location trip that will give it the in medias res structure with flashbacks that will put the previous events in perspective. Perspective is one of the benefits of taking way too long, I suppose.

Also it sounds like everyone agrees Ripple training is the cat’s pajamas. For me the Lynda classes leave a lot to be desired, but that probably has to do more with my specific questions as far as media management. For people experienced in Ripple do you think it will do a better job of addressing these concerns?

Thank you!