Major League Assistance Needed! Re: Large Batches

[PimpDaddyDA]

Hi again, I'm the one with about 80 hours of footage, 3 -300gb of drive space and I'm swimming in misery!!

What's the best way to go....

Plan A: preview each scene I like, store the clip, then sync up the dialogue... (which will take me 2 months? )

Plan B: download each entire tape in one shot, take clips out of it and put it on the time line, and then sync up the dialogue to the clips?
(this way seems faster, but I'll run out of drive space in no time...)
(there are no time codes and scene detect doesn't work)

After I download an entire clip, is there way to take what I need from it and delete the remainder of the unused clip? That would be cool if possible... but I don't see a way to do it...?

:( Stressed out in post production Hell!

Thanks for your time and assistance my cyber dvx'ers

Darryl Abbinante
www.mogthemovie.com

[Neil Rowe]

you could just do a batch capture and go through the tapes marking all th eins and out points for the clips youll actualy use and then just get the good takes.. or you could just turn on scene deetection and have each shot or take be its own clip so you can review them later and simply delete the bad ones. . that would at least save you some HDD space. youll have to synch dialog in post any way you do it if it was a seperate system... id personally just hit scene detection and not worry about HDD space and delete junk takes as i went along.. or just use project manager to delete unused clips.

[Shooter]

80 hours is a hell of a lot of media whichever way you deal with it so I suggest...

1. Get an assistant editor to paper edit out the junk media and create a paper edit of ins and out points on each tape. Capture ins and outs but use scene detect at the same time to get your self somewhat organised. (Important: Delete junk scenes from the project bin as well as the capture bin at the same time). *

2. Rent / buy / borrow extra drives.

3. Get in lots of coffee / beer/ cigarettes...you got a big job ahead of you. Good luck

* Tip: I create a column in the Project Window called 'Delete' - I position it as the 2nd left column and I type a "Y" into it whenever I find a junk clip. When I want to delete junk clips I do a sort on that column so they (the Ys) are all together. I select them all and right click for "Unlink Media" Options where you can select to delete from the DIsk or just the bin..

[PimpDaddyDA]

Thanks, seems like I've got alot of previewing to do.
I thought editing was fun? Pass the whiskey!

Darryl

[soarprod]

Editing is fun and yet crisis management at the same time!

[Neil Rowe]

shooter,
..i dont get it.. you have to preview the tape to see the ins and out points to set.. so why not just preview it in your NLE capture utility and set them as you go .. and then actually caputure it.. you only can ,and have to do one tape at a time. so your not set to sitting down to caputure 80 hours at once. and you can just print out a clip log file if you want later if you need it for anything. to do it once on paper and then do have to go in and set the points later in your NLE, when you couldve just done it all at once in your NLE seems like redundant work. is there a point or purpose to the paper thing that i missing somewhere?

[Shooter]

Advantage with an assistant editor lies in previewing, preferably on a separate deck or else a different shift. Doing a quick and dirty paper capture selection frees up the NLE Capture facility. Dual stream processing the task - log one tape and capture another at the same time.

Type in and log the in/outs . - saves disk space and is quicker to do than .
Scene detect - creates some organisation of clips in the bin

The assistant should also be gorgeous and be nice company through the long post production nights this project will take.

I agree " Editing is fun and yet crisis management at the same time!" - the emphasis on management.

[Neil Rowe]

makes sense. of course if you have access to 2 capture utilities and 2 computers and the lovely editing assistant you mention, you could both just click to set ins and outs, and have two captures/logging at once as well. just cause clicking one button to set in or out is ALOT faster than writing it down or typing it in somewhere. so that would be optimal. but with only one computer and capture utility the method you mentioned would certainly make things quicker. :)

[thisiswells]

Plan A: preview each scene I like, store the clip, then sync up the dialogue... (which will take me 2 months? )
Editing a 24p DVX feature should take 4-6 months if done well. You need more time.

Sfa cataloguing tapes, here's what I did: play them with a timecode burn in into a Sony Handycam with memory stick. Press the "still photo" button each time it cuts to a new clip; effectively you're making a framegrab of the videotape with TC burn-in for reference. Take the stills into iPhoto kind of software and print out a "tape log" with the frame grabs. Simple and effective. You can make a tape log while doing very little work besides watching your tapes and sitting on a couch with a remote control and by pressing the photo button whenever you're so inclined. Worked for me, anyways.

[PDX_DVX]

thisiswells, that's a pretty clever idea. That would probably be the way I would go if I were doing a paper edit of it. As far as streamlining the process, I would say just sit down, review the clips in your NLE, and set your in and out points and just do a large batch capture. If you had 2 systems, you could even use one to review and make batch lists, and the other to capture. I believe in premiere you can save batch lists and transfer them to another computer. You could almost use the one system to capture, and start your next batch list creation on the other computer while the first is capturing, although it might take you longer to create a batch list than it would to capture. Any way you cut it, this process is going to take a long time. Break out the coffee pot and red bull!

[BLUESPIDER]

Find an assisstant!

If you're going to sit through the entire 80hrs, you might as well start capturing or busting out with an EDL. There's really no easy way. Don't think about it, suck it up and start doing it!

Word!

[TeleDan]

Hey Darryl,

Take a look at an inexpensive tool called ScenalyzerLive ( www.scenalyzer.com ). I use it for all my capturing and much prefer it to PPro for this purpose. The great thing is that you can quickly preview all your clips from disk without going through the madness of PPro where it insists on conforming the audio. It's speedy and has a number of capture options that might work for you. ScenalyzerLive will even let you print a clip index with lots of flexibility. Download it and try it for free. I have never tried tackling a project anywhere close to your size but I think you might find it useful.

-Dan

[PimpDaddyDA]

I'm gong to check out the scenalyzer...looks interesting...

If worse comes to worse, I'll just buy a couple more 300GB drives, which will give me a total of 1.5 TB's.... Dump the entire 80 hours on all 5 drives... then slice and dice like no man has done before!

We've got to get this thing into Sundance before 9-30-05 or I'm out of the race!

Thanks for all your advice....

Sincerely,

Darryl Abbinante
www.MOGTheMovie.Com