Editing a feature film

J

JPenna

Member
Well, I just got a gig editing my first feature film :) Everything I've edited so far have been either broadcast commercials or short films -- nothing nearly as long as this is gonna be.

It was shot on the GY-100 in 720/24p. There's about 20 hours of footage.

So, here are a few questions:

How much storage space will I need? I know a deal where I can get a 2TB Lacie for $500, but will 2TB be enough?

How should I capture the footage?

It was shot onto HDV tapes and I'm probably gonna be renting a deck or borrowing one from a friend. Is it worth capturing to an offline format first?

ProRes or MPEG?

Now I just have to find a JVC BR50 deck or one of the GY-HD series cameras for rent in Boston, lol.
 
Edit HDV- no reason to go down to another format. Most editors would consider HDV to be quite offline already. 2 TB is more than you'd need for 20 hours of HDV. For 20 hours you'll need less than 200GB. So I'd go for a nice RAID of 1TB or less. That would give you much better performance. Personally am not a fan of LaCie- too many lost drives. Instead I'd stick with G-Tech, CalDigit or Dulce Systems.

Noah
 
HDV is around 11 gigs an hour, so that's around 220 gig's. ProRes will actually take up a lot more space than HDV. I personally don't like editing in HDV. Too many headaches on export as it has to re-conform the MPEG stream which takes forever, and for a feature forget it! I'd transcode to DVCPRO HD, as Final Cut plays real nice with it and it's easy to dump back out to tape. Takes up alot more space though. Just get the biggest drive you can afford...AND BACK UP YOUR SH*T!
 
Ahh - I've got a few 500GB drives, so they should suffice. I was thinking it would need a lot more storage space.

Oh yeah, I'll back it up onto 2 or 3 drives... I've heard plenty of horror stories of people losing entire features due to drives going bad.

Looks like I'll have to rent the HD100 for $200/weekend to be able to capture it :-|
 
Man that's a horrible story...At least you have tapes. Do what I do and put them into a fireproof safe after capturing.
 
Yeah, my friend was the DP on that -- must have been devastating. Worst thing is that the trailer actually looks really good.
 
NoahK said:
Edit HDV- no reason to go down to another format. Most editors would consider HDV to be quite offline already. 2 TB is more than you'd need for 20 hours of HDV. For 20 hours you'll need less than 200GB. So I'd go for a nice RAID of 1TB or less. That would give you much better performance. Personally am not a fan of LaCie- too many lost drives. Instead I'd stick with G-Tech, CalDigit or Dulce Systems.

Noah
Click to expand...

Nice, yeah G-Tech rocks... we are going with a 2 TB RAID from CalDigit, I've paid for it but waiting for it to come in for the new Mac Pro I'm using, so excited to have that RAID setup. It's going to help our workflow speed a lot. It's good to hear someone say something good about CalDigit, though, haven't heard much about them except Mac Hollywood highly recommends their products so that's why I went with it.
 
Leaving the backup HD at a friend's house is a good precaution. Unlikely that
disaster will stike at two different locations at the same time. I've lost a short,
andl loosing that was enough to make me worry.
 
My company shoots and cut entirely with HDV footage shot with the JVC GY-HD 110E. One make sure the deck or camera you use to capture with has had all firmware update made on it. We constently experiance problems with lost footage from take to take. From what I have read this seems to be a problem with firewire, FCP, and the format itself HDV. The only work around I have found is to capture via a HDMI input. The JVC HDV deck has one but you'll need a captuure card like Blackmagic's intensity pro as well.

Another tip I could give is to do a general color correction to the raw footage first, then do your color matching after you have picture lock. This will save you a lot of head ache time on the back end.
 
NoahK said:
Edit HDV- no reason to go down to another format. Most editors would consider HDV to be quite offline already. 2 TB is more than you'd need for 20 hours of HDV. For 20 hours you'll need less than 200GB. So I'd go for a nice RAID of 1TB or less. That would give you much better performance. Personally am not a fan of LaCie- too many lost drives. Instead I'd stick with G-Tech, CalDigit or Dulce Systems.

Noah
Click to expand...


Hi Noah, I use a Lacie, and I'm curious what do you mean by "lost drives"? Should I expect to lose some info. saving everything to my Lacie external harddrive?
 
Any drive can fail- just in my experience LaCie is especially susceptible but then again others love them.

Noah
 
I've said it before...I've lost several hard drives over the years, but I have a couple store bought drives I stuffed in cheap, third party enclosures over five years ago that are still going strong.
 
NoahK said:
Any drive can fail- just in my experience LaCie is especially susceptible but then again others love them.

Noah
Click to expand...

So to prevent losing data, could daisy chain and second external HD to the current external HD, and save my films to this back-up external HD? (Trying to avoid saving anything to the Mac)

Does daisy chaining external HD's work, I just found out about Daisy Chaining last week and it works great for capturing with firewire from the camera so I'm no longer loading my Mac up with gb sucking files. Thanks.

Also, my Lacie is running slower than it was before, is this a sign that a crash is on the horizon?
 
Daisy chaining is kind of an old school term. These days it's more RAID and we show how to do this on my HVX200 and EX1 discs for data management. If you want to be *really* secure with your backups switch to an LTO or DLT drive. Those are a lot less prone to failure as long term storage than any hard drive.

Noah
 
Hey, for cheaper tape backup, if you have a minidv camera, or better yet, an old Digital8 camera lying around you can backup to tape with this nifty little program.

http://www.coolatoola.com/

Up to 17.5 gigs a tape. I think Digital8 would be better as Hi8 tapes are bigger and more robust. The only negative is that it's slow, basically taking 90 minutes to backup 17.5 gigs of data as you can only go as fast as the tape deck can record.
 
Batutta said:
Hey, for cheaper tape backup, if you have a minidv camera, or better yet, an old Digital8 camera lying around you can backup to tape with this nifty little program.

http://www.coolatoola.com/

Up to 17.5 gigs a tape. I think Digital8 would be better as Hi8 tapes are bigger and more robust. The only negative is that it's slow, basically taking 90 minutes to backup 17.5 gigs of data as you can only go as fast as the tape deck can record.
Click to expand...

ouch- you might as well just put your footage under the mattress if you roll the dice what that sorta hack. :tongue:

Noah
 
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