[Tom Morton]

Not sure what you ended up doing, but I shoot all my video on the 5D IV at 4K, even though I export at FHD. When I edit in Premier Pro I always create low quality proxies using an ffmpeg script first, and then editing is much smoother. Shooting at 4K means I can crop it down in post if I want to zoom in and helps other effects too.

[Tom Morton]

What did you go with in the end, did you find a good solution?

[Tom Morton]

Agree with that. I don’t worry so much about folder structure but I do think it’s important to keep layers clean in After FX, Illy and InDesign. Premiere Pro is the only program that I spend a lot of time organising all the project folders and assets, and that’s only because I often revisit old projects and work on new iterations of them.

[Tom Morton]

PS: don’t touch sharepoint unless you have to. Although secure, it’s a pig to work with, extra storage space is expensive if you need it, and any mainstream cloud storage brand will give you better control in a simpler and more intuitive way.

[Tom Morton]

Ha! I’ve been there and done this!

I know there’s a lot of mixed views on this subject but I’ve tried several solutions and looked at more. I do a lot of video editing and I initially kept everything on hard drives – fast and handy, but to be honest it’s a pain to work projects are where. I basically outgrew the hard drives school of thought when I was hot-swapping between 5 external drives and a couple of internal drives and running out of space. Also I maintain the school of thought that hard drives WILL fail, sometime. It’s when, not if.

So since then I tried out Sharepoint, Onedrive, DropBox and Google Drive. All are ok, but as soon as you start storing TB’s of files, the pricing becomes very flaky. I also looked into AWS, Azure and Google GCP. They’re all ok and not to bad on pricing but much higher skill level to maintain and manage appropriately.

For the last few years I’ve settled down to a hybrid solution which works fairly well. I have a couple of decent internal drives in Raid1, and then I use box.com for backup and offline storage. 2 reasons I use Box.com:

– They have an unlimited data plan for a very reasonable price.

– They offer an older software client that allows you to download / sync folders to a specified location instead of your C drive.

So my hard drives are backed up entirely into box.com, and I have just have the latest projects synced at any time. Once a project is done with, I unsync it and it lives on the cloud. This has the added benefit that it’s very easy to work on an old project – just sync it again and begin working! Keeping the same drive letter means no broken links either.

Another benefit is the Box.com search is very good – really fast, I can search through 8 years and 25 TB of files in just a couple of seconds, and it’s available on the web, via FTP and the phone app which seems reliable.

Fingers crossed, no reason to change yet! Nothing else I’ve tried has really worked, unless I’m prepared to invest big bucks into a industrial level NAS (if you want a NAS, do not cut costs, even expensive ones are naff) or a turnkey cloud solution designed for this.

Let us know what you do, all the best!

[Tom Morton]

Agree with Andy here, anything vector will scale. You might find that a large quantity of raster items also look fine when scaled at 200% also, to save you exporting them again. – worth a try before you begin the work over again, just see how they look.

As a rule of thumb, I tend to always make graphics in illustrator about 4x bigger then required to give me plenty of elbow room for resizing. Don’t worry about your folder structure, I’ve seen plenty of pro’s who don’t give a damn about organising files, got to do what’s right for you.

[Tom Morton]

Also try rendering your 8bit video that looks grainy and see if it still looks grainy on render? you might find that if you render it on a decent setting it may come out looking better?

[Tom Morton]

Why don’t you use 8bit video but increase the resolution? Ensure that sampling is set to “none” and maybe try 4K and 8K video sizes. If you are creating the base video yourself, you can create it square which makes it easier to work with in C4D – so try 4000×4000 and 8000×8000 res and see if that fixes the issue.

[Tom Morton]

George, on your method can’t you use xpresso for the file names? Use file path, and replace the ‘map_XXXX’ with ‘map_’+time although would have to ensure leading zero’s are preserved.

[Tom Morton]

Reckon it’s a lot easier to use a video, even if it’s compressed should work more smoothly. I’ve got an ImageMagick script I use to quickly convert image sequences to video, LMK if you want a copy.