Shane Ross
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[Jonathan Reed] “The director says that the cinematographer just dragged and dropped it over into the external.”
Well, with the file structure you show…that isn’t the case. Camera’s don’t make folders labeled that way.
Shane
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OMG! What did the director do? Yeah, he didn’t keep the same file structure AT ALL. He reorganized everything. Bad bad bad.
Well, you need to break it to him that with what he did, you can’t import properly into Avid. Can’t really properly import into Premiere Pro or other editing software. What if there are spanned clips? Takes that go across 2 or more clips? They won’t be joined when importing….the spans won’t be connected. Has this person edited before? What did they use, how did they do it? Because this is ALL wrong.
What I would do in your shoes…is A) Tell the director that the way they organized things makes it impossible for me to properly import into my editing software, and will mess up things down the line, meaning online and color grade. Tell them that they need to keep the card structure intact, always…never reorganize the camera originals.
Then B) Offer a solution to make NEW masters from this. Meaning, use conversion software to make high resolution files that will serve as news masters throughout the post process. Use Resolve or EditReady or other software to convert the files to ProRes HQ files. And yes, the files will be MUCH LARGER than the camera originals, but this is what needs to be done if the post process is to be smooth from start to finish. This is why you NEVER break up the camera masters…you could import them and convert them to proxy files and cut those then refer back to the masters for later online, but not after this was done.
They obviously used something to view the files, and then organize them…why on earth would they do this? What they did is just plain wrong, any Digital Intermediate Technician (DIT) will tell you, any assistant editor will tell you… Ugh, I feel for you…this is a mess.
Shane
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Best way…hardware. Not cheap. Blackmagic Design Terranex, or even the AJA Kona capture card will do this.
A good way…Adobe Premiere upscales decently, I use it on occasion for archival footage. After Effects is even better.
There are also plugins like Instant HD or others from Red Giant. Now, it won’t look like it was shot 1080, there is just no way to blow up the pixels like that and make it look HD, but it’ll look OK…decent.
Shane
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[Jonathan Reed] “My experience is in Premier and FCP7, this is my first project working with MC…”
This would be the workflow for them too…expecially FCP 7. FULL card backups are needed in order to use LOG AND TRANSFER, without those…FCP 7 would be useless.
[Jonathan Reed] “as such you are using a lot of words and mentioning programs that I don’t know what they are. “
Oh…sorry…I’ll try to elaborate.
[Jonathan Reed] “Maintain full card structure : he brought in an external and moved files over to my computer. He gave me two.
Movie Media Raw (that he has organized as stated above) and MovieAllFiles that then goes into MovieAllFiles->01-rawfootage/02-RawAudio then its’ filed into scene number with scene2-> AVCHD, M4ROOT (File), SONY (FILE), XDROOT (FILE)”OK…so it SOUNDS like he has the raw files backed up in the card structure…GOOD. Whew. Still, he needs to know he should not do ANY organization of camera raw in the way he has. That is only trouble.
[Jonathan Reed] “I don’t know what AMA link is or how to do it, thought this isn’t the first time i’ve come across this word. “
Sorry, Avid keeps changing the way it does this, and that one stuck. Currently, it’s INPUT>SOURCE BROWSER… use that (very similar to how Adobe does it) to navigate to the root level of the card backups…not the “rawfootage” but the “scene2” folder…click that and choose LINK. Well, make a bin first, then do that. The bin should then populate with clips. From there, you transcode the media, and move them to other bins. BUT KEEP THIS BIN…name it the same name as the folder you imported from, and LINK…so “scene2_Link.” You’ll need this bin in order to relink later. It would be wise to modify all the clips from each link before you transcode…change the TAPEID or SOURCE to be the name of the folder…so “scene2.” This adds a level of metadata needed to relink, as AVCHD numbering and timecode starts over from scratch every new card. Annoying.
[Jonathan Reed] “What is NLE?”
Non Linear Editor…Avid, FCP, Adobe, these are all NLEs. Editing software.
Shane
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[Jonathan Reed] ” The director of my project is very organized. his file system runs like this MOVIE MEDIA RAW -> Scene 1 -> Take 1 -> Clip0012.MXF”
No, the director is not. Your director is completely messing up things. He’s ripping apart the card structure by putting the raw into separate files. This not only makes it impossible for many NLE’s to import the media, but this also destroys a lot of the metadata sidecar information…contained in separate files in separate folders. THE FULL CARD STRUCTURE needs to be maintained. Archive the full card to a separate folder with date and project but DO NOT rearrange any of the files inside. Your director is messing everything up.
Tell him to stop this, now. It’s going to cause major problems in the post process from beginning to end. Especially when you go to online…this will be a MAJOR hassle and cost tons of money to fix.
[Jonathan Reed] “There has to be an easier way to do this, a faster way”
Yes. Maintain the full card structure. AMA link to that card. Transcode the media, do all the organizing and labeling INSIDE the edit system. If the director wants to do the organizing, then they can play Assistant Editor and get a copy of Media Composer and learn the proper way to do this, or hire an AE.
[Jonathan Reed] ” I’m hesitant to rename his Clip0012.mxf files to Take 1, and put them all into Scene 1 file as his maps and his audio engineers’ maps and everyone else’s maps are queued to the previous set.”
Yup, that would be very wrong too. NEVER EVER rename camera original files. This will cause even more problems down the line.
[Jonathan Reed] “Any suggestions? is there another way around this?”
Proper workflow…
1) Shoot.
2) Archive the camera card…to TWO locations (two drives)…as one drive might fail and if it does, you lose all your footage. Two locations…or a RAID 1 set of drives.
3) Link to the media and transcode to separate MEDIA drives.
4) Do all the labeling and organizing in your NLE
5) Edit
6) relink back to masters for online…or send AAF to Resolve or other online system, and camera masters.If you use something like Premiere and plan to cut native, or plan to cut native in Avid…then step 3 would be to copy the files over from your archive drives to the Media Drive and link and edit. But never ever mess up the camera original file structure.
Shane
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[kevin brown] “How would I be able to transcode to the cloud? Avid does not show my cloud drive.”
You can’t, sorry. The hard drive location needs to be locally attached at this time.
[kevin brown] “Basically I’ll like to be able to edit on multiple devices at work and home.”
Then either bring the drive home and to work, or duplicate the media. If you duplicate media, and rendering you do in one location will have to be redone at the other.
Shane
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Do not convert the MTS files outside of Avid before AMA linking…if you want Avid to relink to the MTS files. No, AMA link to those MTS files…transcode right then and there to DNx36. Edit… Then relink back to the MTS files and transcode to higher quality DNxHR for finishing.
Shane
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[Fábio Rodrigues] “I’m getting mpeg, mov and avi.”
Those are containers….just FYI. Like saying “I am getting a can, and a bottle, and a tin.” What is IN those tins? MPEG is more specific…that can be MPEG 4 or MPEG 2…so that’s a better description. But MOV…that can be H.264, or DNxHR, or ProRes, or Cineform, or any number of codecs. AVI is more limited, but still, can be H.264 or any number of codecs.
[Fábio Rodrigues] “I want to convert them for editing.
After that I would like to use the original files for a better quality work,”Then look into the Premiere Pro PROXY workflow. Highlight all those clips and have PPro make proxies of them, something easy like ProRes Proxy or LT (if on a Mac, PCs can’t do ProRes)…if on a PC, then DNxHR LB…and then one button allows you to switch between the two.
Shane
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“FULL HD” and 4K only mean frame size. Full HD being 1920×1080, and 4K…well, could be many things. 4K is 4096×2160, but is also used interchangeably with UHD, which is 3840×2160…true 16:9.
Frame size isn’t what matters…CODEC is what matters. Is it H.264, ProRes, AVCHD (h.264 variant), DNxHR, Cineform…? Those are what matter. Editing ProRes or DNxHR, for example, are pretty easy as they are “editing codecs,” they are pretty large files, but the compression allows for easy editing. Where AVCHD, MP4…H.264…isn’t all that easy to edit, while their file sizes are smaller. It takes resources to “decompress” them on the fly to play back and edit them.
So…what format of files are you getting? Will you convert them, or do you want to edit them native?
Shane
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