[Jane Greenberg]

Thanks so much, Nick. This is really helpful. Jane

[Jane Greenberg]

Well, I’ve been shamed into giving a bit more background information, since all the responses to my question about an automated capture feature are making me feel really silly. So here’s the deal. This project has 320 hours of footage that has already been shot (no joke). It’s a documentary and there are still a few more shoots to go. The producer director is trying to winnow down the tapes before capturing them, BUT she has promised the community that she is filming that she will donate all the footage to their community center archive. Which means we will be capturing most of those tapes and delivering a drive to the community. Since it’s much quicker to review material by scrubbing through it digitally than logging on a tape, and I am co-editing the film, I was hoping to streamline the process by automating the capture feature to create master clips, and then subclipping where necessary. But I’ve talked to enough experts to know that this feature does not exist, so I will simply type clip timecodes at 10 minute intervals. Not a big deal with 100 tapes, but 320 it’s somewhat intimidating. I am also exporting select sections of tapes as audio files to be used for digital transcription. But again, this is much easier to tackle if all the material has been captured. I think 10-minute clips is a safe duration–it seems like it could be problematic to capture the entire tape as one clip, but maybe that’s not risky. THere is no problem stopping clips mid-sentence or at unnatural in and out points. The important thing is that I can quickly lay them into a sequence without having to adjust the timing. So I am advancing one frame after each out point to begin my next 10-minute clip. If you still think this method is foolish and have any suggestions, I would appreciate it. Thanks, Jane

[Jane Greenberg]

Thanks a lot, Walter. I don’t think we will capture all 350 hours, but I wouldn’t be surprised if 250 went in. There are a couple of reasons we’re planning to capture such a large percentage of the material. At some point the footage will be given back to the community where it was shot for a historical archive. We are also having an assistant capture the material so that the editor & director can scrub through it quickly to determine what parts need logging. It’s rather daunting to have such a huge amount of material– a little less daunting if we can access it from a drive.

But if we assume 250 hours of DV footage needs storage, we might be able to get by with 6TB drive (although I’m a little confused about how much space is used in a RAID for redundancy and how much is actually available for use). I’ll look into that. Given the nature of the project and the real time rendering capacity of FCP 6, I don’t expect we’ll need to double the space for render and other source files. Plus we’ll have a few hundred GB on our hard drive available and may get a portable FW drive as well.

My initial thought was that a RAID might serve the dual purpose of storage and backup drive. But since we are not making clones, I think it’s risky to have one drive serve as the media drive and backup. So now, with the understanding that a RAID 5 will likely be the best option for the media drive in terms of reliablility and protection for the project, I think we ‘ll need a second drive on which we can copy all the media files and store offsite as a backup. Not sure if you have any thoughts on the second drive, and if you would still recommend a RAID for that job. I’m grateful for your input. Thanks, Jane