Hvx workflow suggestions needed

Schmovies production

Schmovies production

Well-known member
I'm going to cover a boatshow in Ponza island at the end of the month.
I'm going to shoot a lot, then this time i need to organize my footage for post.
I will shoot all day with two 8g P2. I have a camera assistant and a digital assistant.
I was thinking:
The Camera Asst. will give the P2 to the Dig. Asst. with a log of the takes. The DA will put the P2 in a laptop, P2 viewer check'em and following the log will choose clips he will burn in a dvd
At the end of the day he will tranfer all the footage stored in the laptop in a Big Disk, then clean the laptop, ready for the next day.

Problems:
1- How to take a log of the takes? There will be many takes in a P2, giving them a 1-2-3 order can bring confusion.
2- how to choose fast the takes to store on a dvd? I would prefer not to print the bad takes on DVD.
3- Can I change the names of the clips from the P2 with something simpler? Or maybe with a chronological order from the very first take to the end of the shooting day?

Any suggestion will be higly appreciated, best,
p.
 
Just as far as burning to a DVD. It will be alot of DVD's! if you are shooting 1080, it will be about 4 minutes of footage per DVD-R. And depending on burn speed,. that could be quite sometime...I highly suggest an external HDD to dump the footage to, and since i dont know too much about the P2 renaming system, i would recommend using folders to organize each shoot.

SO for example you can name a folder by the time the card was taken out of the HVX200 so you know if it was early footage and remember in general what it is from the time of the day you shot it, and then look through each timed folder dump the DA makes to decide on what clips to use.

Burning on DVD will be a nightmare, and if you were i wouldnt trust a burn thats above 4x and you would also have to double the amount of time giving to each burn to allow for a full verify check after its done. Playing back the files from DVD-R will be a pretty big problem because of the access speed of the drives.
 
Hi cynic,
I'm shooting 720. You are damn right, dvd are slow to burn. But I really would like to dump in two different media. I'm afraid of hard disks.
 
I wouldnt be too worried about HDD's, im more worried about burning. Plus we are talking about a REALLY REALLY long process and you might as well use tapes when it comes to getting the footage back onto an HDD for editing.
 
This is the power of sharing on this forum.
i'm going on the field with one laptop and one lacie 160 FW 800 and a Bigdisk. No Dvds.
And Cynic, i hope you peed with satisfaction.
 
Hey Schmovie,

I think cynik is right, i did the same, but why not to use a raid 1 external hdd?
I dont think that something will happen in this one day, but just to feel better you could get a maxtor onetouch for example, running raid 1.

good luck..and enjoy the excitment!
 
Don't be afraid of hard drives. That fear will make you burn DVDs so endlessly, that you'll kick yourself for expending so much time. Do it later if you're paranoid. What I do is attach a bus powered firewire 80 GB drive to my G4 laptop. I slip in the P2 cards into the laptop after I'm done shooting, and copy my footage in two locations: (1) internal laptop HD; and (2) on the bus powered drive.

At the end of the day, I then take my footage back home, and transfer it from its two existing locations to 2 NEW locations (for redundancy and sanity) -- my Lacie 250 GB drive and a 1 terabyte G-RAID. I clear the bus powered drive and my internal laptop HD, and I'm free to shoot again...

This has worked great for me... as far as naming your clips... well, that can be arduous, but it's not a big deal. I copy each P2 card into a new numbered FOLDER. When you go back to edit, etc., (I use FCP 5.1), I re-name the individual clips in the browser and modify/color them to reflect if it's a "best take", etc...

Keeping logs on site is a good idea, so you'll always know exactly what the alphanumeric HVX-named clips correspond to.

--Justin.
 
Justin Reade makes some good points.

These days hard drives are reliable enough (as long as you treat them properly) that you can be pretty secure transferring your P2 card to a RAID-1 mirror set (redundant copies of data is kept on two or more drives) and not worry too much about burning DVD-Rs. On the other hand, you might want to archive your selected takes on some form of non-mechanical media like DVD-R, DVD+R/DL, or Blu-Ray. The one big advantage of DVD-R, DVD+R/DL, and Blu-Ray disks is you can inadvertantly delete files on them. Read-only media is good for archiving. You can create read-only disk images or disk partitions, and this is another way to prevent accidental loss, but it's no guarantee against hardware failures, and thus RAID-1 with two or three drives is a good idea for additional security.

The key point is that it's important to have your data in at least two places at once. Things like the Bigdisk might seem appealing from a storage capacity standpoint, but they are more likely to lead to data loss as they are RAID-0 disks (data is split accross two or more drives) so if either drive fails, you've lost everything.

Statistics, sanity, and sensible thinking leads to a workflow that combines the use of a minimum of a mirrored RAID-1 set in the field and in addition, off-line (and better yet off site) backups in some format that is not hard drive for long term archiving once you get back to your editing room. Whatever you do, design a system so that any one hard drive can fail you you can recover without panic. The ultimate system can involve move redundancy, but at some point you have to calculate the cost/benefit trade off. The good old videotape on the shelf as the archive has been a good solid backup for a long time, so that's another option for off-line archiving.
 
Hey Schmovie,

Davis already explained it, in easy words it means that there are physicly two different hdd, if you copy your p2 cards, this will resolt in 2 copies on 2 different disks at the same time.
If one drive dies, you will still have a copy on the other drive.
When i went to rome, i had a Maxtor one touch3 with me (one Terrabyte is already at the cost of 700 euro or less-damn i bought it more expensive then..!) so if you use this in raid one, it will result in about 500 GB space for you, should be enough for the beginning, and quite safe!

p.s.dont throw the drive on the ground, cause then you got a good chance to destroy both HDD in the case...brrr..my horror..so always burn dvds as well....

give a good kick to the computer shops in rome, they are mostly to pricy!
 
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