Digital Age Newbie Backup Media Card Question

G

gogglegurf

Member
Thanks in advance for any help or assurance. I'm shooting a lot of interviews with professional skiers that would be very difficult/costly to access again if I lose my acquisition. I know in theory that I should be safe to reformat my media cards to reuse after I log and transfer to FCP. I'm also making a back up copy to a portable hard drive.

Getting ready for another round of interviews and want to sleep at night knowing that I backed up everything properly before reusing my 8 cards. Any advice. I'm thinking of getting another external hard drive too. Rather than copying FCP to my hard drives should I be backing up the data on the media card separately?

Thanks Again!
 
If you want to back up your raw footage you should back up your cards, but make sure that you copy entire PRIVATE folder unchanged. In Log & transfer you can point it to any location on your local hard disc or external drive, it is not necessary to do it from the card directly.

There is no point in backing up transcoded prores files, since they are much larger, and native avchd you might want to use in some other application or transcode to something else or edit natively someday.

How many physical locations you back up your data to, it is up you. I know people are taking fires, thefts, earthquakes, tsunamis and alien invasions into consideration sometimes.
 
Thanks Interface. Appears to be working. My 1st try I dragged the No Name Icon into my Ext Hard Drive Icon. This time I opened No Name and dragged the PRIVATE folder in. That seems to be doing it the right way.
 
Sorry if this has already been answered but on the same topic...

Say you have material on different subjects on the same card that you want to separate when you archive the footage. Can you import the whole PRIVATE folder onto an external drive and put it into a named folder, then copy that PRIVATE folder into another folder with a different name and then delete unwanted material from each so that you have different topics in their respective folders?

Thanks!
 
Well, whenever you delete any of the files in the PRIVATE folder in your computer, you mess up it's structure and it becomes unreadable for Log & Transfer.
Do some tests and check what happens.

You can delete clips in camera.

There are some tools that rebuild folder structure, but I have never tried that.
 
I use avccam viewer to copy the card to the Hard drive but as was mentioned, copying the Private folder works well. Stick that folder into a parent folder that you have named. Do NOT change the name of the private folder. Point FCP to the private folder in L&T.

Even when editing with a NLE that doesn't care about the folder structure, you will still have any metadata etc.
 
Deleting clips in camera is very time consuming so there has to be a quicker way.

" whenever you delete any of the files in the PRIVATE folder in your computer you mess up it's structure and it becomes unreadable for Log & Transfer. "

I only have Edius 2.5 so far (came free with my new HMC) but as a quick test I just deleted some clips from a Private folder, then I shut down the software, rebooted and Edius carried on working with the contents of that folder - it sees all of the other clips and lets me work on them.
 
Yes, in Edius and few other NLE that work with native AVCHD files, you don't need folder structure. When working in Premiere, I just copy .mts files from the card. And that is more convenient I agree.

But for Final Cut, the whole Private folder and it's structure is treated as wrapper, and is necessary for L&T to work.
 
OK, thanks for that tip. I will back up all files onto a spare external drive without altering them just in case I ever need to edit with FC!
 
Denwa or others, I noticed the advice not to change the name of the private folder. I did when a copied each media card to my external hard drive. I am shooting a bunch of interview material with many subjects (about 40 minutes each interview). I've been filling my 6 cards copying the Private folder to my Seagate and changing Private to the name(s) of the subject on the card. I've created a folder that I've dragged all my Private (now renamed the subjects in the folder). Is this going to mess things up?

Thanks for any advice!
 
gogglegurf said:
Denwa or others, I noticed the advice not to change the name of the private folder. I did when a copied each media card to my external hard drive. I am shooting a bunch of interview material with many subjects (about 40 minutes each interview). I've been filling my 6 cards copying the Private folder to my Seagate and changing Private to the name(s) of the subject on the card. I've created a folder that I've dragged all my Private (now renamed the subjects in the folder). Is this going to mess things up?

Thanks for any advice!
Click to expand...

For FCP you will have to rename each previously renamed folder back to "private" or FCP will get all cantankerous and grey out everything in L&T.

Even though I am editing with NLE's that donlt care about the file structure (Edius etc) I keep it anyways.

Here's what I do. I create a folder with whatever name I wish to give it. Copy the private folder into that. You can of course nest this into to other forlders. Point L&T to the private folder when you need ot import the footage.

ie

Footage_Dumps
-- Stripper Doc
---- Angel's Interview
------ PRIVATE

or whatever.
 
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