Archiving the final cut

T

travis

Active member
I have a doubt about the workflow with these cameras.
i see that for mantaining a back up of the every file recorded, a dvd or a blu-ray will be good enough.
But what about for the final cut, the edited material, of any project. In the mini dv tapes times i would just make a digital cut back to a dv tape.
What about now. Just to save it in the more formats as possible?
What would be the "master format"

Many times, after ending a project (i rewind to mini dv times) i back up to tape knowing that if i have to deliver the material onto a format that i haven´t compressed i could recapture the edited material and make another compression/ or maybe i want to change some cuts from there...
In those cases i have the mini dv tape as a master source.
Resuming, what would be the master source in the solid state memory times?
 
Actually, because the format is AVC h.264 in acquisition and final Blu-Ray standard is also AVC h.264 then you can consider the final copy of a Blu-Ray DVD the same as a master final in the same native format you captured/edited in (depending on your editing system at time of posting.) Panasonics HDWriter software literlally rips the files from the flash media to your HD and will record the same files to a BD-R disc.
I hope this helps.
 
An alternative approach (and what I do) is to archive to hard drives. Terabyte drives are around $100 now; I bung completed projects on them, yank the drive from the (eSATA) chassis, place it in a WiebeTech DriveBox, label it up, and put it on a shelf. It's not dramatically more expensive, per hour of storage, than DV tape, and the costs will only come down over time.

Note that - like optical media - hard drives aren't necessarily stable in the long term. They should ideally be spun up and verified (or cloned) every year or so. Apparently.
 
when i offload a card i create a folder that corresponds with that card, i put the private folder in it. then when i go to log and transfer in final cut, i choose that folder, not the private folder, but the one i named that corresponds with the card/project. once you log and transfer in final cut, the files in the bin will have the reel name of that folder.

edit, finish project, yay.

trash capture scratch folder.

then hang on to the fcp file and the raw avchd folders that you created.

if you need to open that project back up, simply mount the needed cards in your log and trasfer window then batch capture.

now however you choose to archive the fcp file and avchd files is up to you. but i put on both optical and hard drive.

i shoot mostly to 8gb sdhc cards and dual layer dvds have come down in price drastically in the past year, around a buck now.
 
for some reason my macbook pro can't read dual layer dvd disks.. or I would love to store my projects on those
 
And hopefully in the near future we will be able to go back to the folders if needed and batch build a new video master with native avchd.
 
I tend to archive a copy of the final product in a HQ codec (Apple ProRes) on a HD (in case i ever need to excerpt/make trailers/compress to a different codec, etc.), and copies on disc in the highest bitrate H.264 I can fit on a DVD-R or DVD-DL. When Blu-ray media prices drop, I'll use that...
 
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