[Joby Anthony jr]

Dropbox is what we use, combined with NAS.

As Eric mentions, basically a 3-2-1 backup/archive strategy. But a combination of cloud and on-prem. Which I believe just about everyone in the industry uses in some combination mitigated against cost and risk.

We did ‘sneaker-net’ for awhile. And like your experience, you end up with various versions of things, risk of losing a drive, etc.

Basically, what you’re doing sounds sufficient, and certainly has the advantage of accessing the latest regardless of which computer you’re logged into at the moment (e.g., work, home, team member, etc.). I’ve even heard of teams that store everything in Dropbox, including original assets. Seems a bit risky IMO, but with care and workflow discipline, I could see it working.

But yeah, unless you’re willing to tote around a single harddrive everywhere you go and incrementally back it up, the cloud definitely has some advantages, especially for storing smaller project files such as Premiere.

[Joby Anthony jr]

Thank you Neil for stating/re-stating what I feel many try and put their heads into the proverbial sand over–data migration is a fact of life–period.

Joby.

[Joby Anthony jr]

Good afternoon Jean! As I’ve been watching this thread, I “think” your solution is to frankly have the image recreated in something like After Effects. That would especially help with the resolution of the handwriting font. Something that’s vectorized. And something that originates from a more video-centric app than one that’s more photo-oriented. I “think.”

I honestly don’t have much experience with any of this, so I’ll let other’s such as Riccardo continue to advise, but from a resolution standpoint, it sounds like you’re basically fighting against the limitations of video, and thus may need to consider what it would take to have that image recreated in something that would survive the limitations of video. Again, maybe.

But I genuinely hear the angst of trying to get something right, and to that end, I wish I had more experience to help. Hopefully you’ll be able to find someone who can assist.

Joby.

[Joby Anthony jr]

And what Doug mentions is key. I too have often wondered about some kind of LaCie specific sleep behaving controller buried in the machine. And wondered if I could access it with one of their apps. But it ultimately seemed a fool’s errand with no value added, so I gave up (plus it seems those LaCie apps wanted to add on all sorts of low-level extensions deep within the OS and again, just didn’t seem worth it to me).

Typically, what I do on any given harddrive it take it out of the box and format it directly with Apple’s Disk Utility (DU). I’m not interested in anything they generally bundle with it, such as security apps or drive controllers, or . . . Now there are other software RAID controllers such as SoftRAID, but I don’t have any experience with it, and Apple’s DU has generally been “good enough” for my needs.

And note, there are instances of hardware-based RAID controllers, but those are typically on more expensive RAID setups that generally use a software app to get to the controls of the hardware. ATTO products come to mind–though there are others.

In terms of the geek speak, the reason I mentioned what I did is because some of the problems you’re experiencing “could be” related to a mismatch of some kind. Like using the Apple Partition Map instead of the GUID Partition Map. Or APFS (on spinning disks) instead of Mac OS Extended (Journaled). Much like the use of 3.1 USB-C vs. the Thunderbolt slot.

One “gotcha” to look out for when using Apple’s DU is the difference between viewing Only Volumes and viewing All Devices. Think of All Devices as the core harddrive (say all 1 TB of a 1 TB drive), and Volumes as sub-parts of the drive (or partitions), where you could have two 500 GB volumes on a 1 TB drive. Volumes that you can mount and unmount independent of one another. Or you could just keep it all as a 1 TB volume, or. . . . But anyway, as you’re playing around with these things, that’s one that can trip someone up, especially when it comes to formatting a drive.

My encouragement would be to unmount (and disconnect) all drives, and then get something you don’t care much about, like say a scratch drive where you can lose everything, and then start poking around at the different ways to format something in DU.

Joby.

[Joby Anthony jr]

I’ve never had slowdown issues with our Lacie RAIDS (that I know of), but the sleep, no sleep, spin up behavior, has been inconsistent at best over the years. So I’ve stopped worrying about. But in terms of actually becoming a problem during an edit, no problems–they’ve otherwise been rock-solid.

And for the record, all on Macs (both Intel and M1), with the put disks to sleep option off, RAID 0 for ultimate speed (and yes with redundant periodic backups), and all formatted has Mac OS Extended (Journaled) because they’re spinning disks, and a GUID Partition Map.

Joby.

[Joby Anthony jr]

Geoff, I can certainly appreciate the USB vs TB whoops on Lacie drives. And I agree w/ Neil. Unsure why they thought that was a good design. But I digress.

The only reason I wanted to chime in here was the mention of the spin-down setting for M1 vs. Intel. It exists for the M1, but because of Ventura totally moving all the settings around, it’s kind of hard to find everything that was so familiar for so many years. Anyway, another digression (apologies–lol).

If you’re on a M1 w/ Ventura, look under System Settings -> Energy Saver. There I found the toggle option for “Put hard disks to sleep when possible.” Oh! And this is on a Mac Studio. Have no idea (but assume?) the setting would be the same on a M1/2 MBPr . . .

Joby.

[Joby Anthony jr]

Unsure exactly your need, but FWIW, we use mogrts that were created for our group that have alpha channels built into them. That allows us to reveal video after the opening animation (vs using a transition like a cross dissolve or wipe). We also have L3rd mogrts.

Maybe a mogrt with an alpha layer is what you need?

Joby.

[Joby Anthony jr]

FWIW Neil, I don’t have experience w/ Dropbox Replay, don’t know what it is, and frankly hadn’t heard of it before. I’m in a large organization which provides Dropbox for us, but I’ve never seen it advertised within our group, even though the video says it’s bundled for free. So maybe our corporate IT has it turned off. Unsure. But . . .

To Michael’s point. I too burn-in timecode and ask that notes be made back accordingly (via Word or Excel generally). However, when instructions aren’t followed and they put notes back directly into the Comments section of Dropbox, I’ve run into the gotcha that I cannot export those comments. In other words, there’s no way easy way (that I’ve found) to get those comments out of there for passing along to the editor or for archiving with the project. An important step in our workflow environment. And, those comments go away once the file is deleted. So a heads-up gotcha there. Unsure if Replay would provide that option or not, but that’s something to watch for IF being able to download those comments are important.

And I agree with Michael in that unless the file is downloaded to the computer prior to playback, I get “glitchy” comments back from a Dropbox review if they don’t do that otherwise. Or, I make such a highly compressed file so that easily transports in Dropbox, but it otherwise makes it almost an audio-only review at that point. Again, unsure if Replay would provide a better user experience.

Re: frame.io., I’ve had very limited experience with it, where our client was the frame.io. paying customer and we just uploaded review copies for them to make their own internal reviews/comments. And then feedback was sent back to our group via email. So the only thing I can comment on here is that uploads were extremely fast. It otherwise seemed slick and competent, and would be tempting if our group could justify the expense over the corporately provided Dropbox account (which at this point, I don’t think I could).

Joby.

[Joby Anthony jr]

I believe the Transform effect with a bunch of little masks can accomplish something similar to what Vik recommends as well.

Joby.

[Joby Anthony jr]

My first thought is to check the framerate of the exported video. Project settings may have been set correctly, but export may have been setup differently, especially if something like a preset was used.

Joby.