Archiving Questions: .mov and BPAV?

jeffmiller

jeffmiller

Active member
Archiving Questions: .mov and BPAV?

Still learning, so here’s my question. If FC uses .mov to edit in right? Then why do I need to keep the original BPAV files? Once ingested into FC cant I just back up the .mov files, am I missing something? Tried searching but UTL.
:dankk2:
 
I would keep BPAV files (it's original) just like keeping the original tapes even after capturing (loading) into the editing program.

What if the editing system crash ?
What if you plan to use other editing system ?
 
I archive all BPAV folders on a mirrored hard drive array. Since it's the camera original, it makes the most sense, to me, to use that for my archives.
 
With BPAV you can convert to a multitude of other formats including MXF etc
With MOV, your basically stuck in quicktime and your only going to be able to edit those clips easily in FCP (mov on a PC isn't a very nice storey in some cases...)

Considering you can re-create the mov from the PBAV at any time, why would you archive anything but the BPAV folder structure? It gives you the most flexibility down the track.
 
We archive the BPAV files to a small portable buss powered drive. When the drive fills up, we buy another drive and put the old one on the shelf.

In addition to this, we archive all our projects. We keep everything associated with the project within it's own folder (we're constantly changing scratch disks in FCP because of this workflow....but we feel it's worth it)

It's actually a lot easier than it sounds. Ideally we would archive the BPAV files to 2 portable drives so we had a back up in case one failed, but we're going to cross our fingers (and pray) that we can use the MOV's if something happened to the BPAV archive drive.

One other thing, I think it's important to archive BOTH the BPAV and MOV because when you're editing in FCP, and you need to restore a project, you'll want the MOV's so FCP can easily re-link to them. If you only have the BPAV's, then you'll have to guess at what you named all the clips and take a considerable amount of time re-linking eveything back up. But I guess if you only use a few long clips for each project, then that wouldn't be too bad. Most of our projects consist of 50-300 clips, so having to manually re-link all those files, would be a lot of work.

Good luck! :)
 
I first archieve to HD and a copy to optical disk. Using Clip browser with CRC turned on.
Then I open up the original BVAP files using XDcam transfer to edit names,create subclips and rewrap to .mov for FCP.
have never had a problem.
Doug Jensen's Ex-1/3 DVd's have some good information regarding the use of these cameras and is highly recommended by myself and many others.
 
Great info, I actually thought of a similar idea to Mitch's because I often import on a MacBookPro in the field and then transfer over to a desktop. So my idea was to set everything to the project folder name including scratch disks from FC, the XDCam software and BPAV folders. Here's what my folder structure looks like using a project name of "test."


1. "Test" being the main project name
1a "Test_CB_BPAV" folder containing BPAV's from Sony Clip Browser
1b "Test_FC" where Final Cut project gets saved to
1c "Test_Fc_ScratchDisk" FC's scratch disk location
1d "Test_XDCam_import" where XDCam transfer software imports too.
1e "test_XDCamTrsfr_cache" Cache loc for XDcam transfer.

Obviously this takes a concentrated effort every time a new project is started but in my little brain it keeps everything together, anymore want to critique. I guess if I only had one computer I wouldn't need this and could just use an external raid or something.
 
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