How to Edit 25hrs simultaniously?

S

Sharp-Shooter

Active member
Hi There!!

I am about to start editing my debut independent documentary project. Shall be using Adobe premiere 6.0. All shot on my DVX100AE - Yes, PAL, I love PAL ;)

My trouble is how to edit the 25 hrs long footage, mostly interviews, to make a 30 or 60 min documentary.
As I have only 200 GB on my computer, which will not accomodate more than 6 to 8 hrs. As you see, I am new to editing, and wish to know some tricks and tips from experts here on the forum. I can always buy one or two harddrives but that still might not be enough for 25 tapes(footage) I have.

So kindly suggest the best options. Ideally I would love to have access to the entire 25hrs of footage on my computer .

Thank you all in advance.
 
Re: How to Edit 25hrs simultaniously?

Capture a low res version to use as a proxy, recapture the edited footage after at full resolution.

It's gonna take time.......
 
Re: How to Edit 25hrs simultaniously?

Or watch all your material in VHS, select the pieces you want to mess with FCP and capture only the first digest.
 
Re: How to Edit 25hrs simultaniously?

If you must have it all on the computer at once you are looking at about 325 gig - A couple 160 Gig HDs would run ya about $250 or so.
 
Re: How to Edit 25hrs simultaniously?

Pookie's suggestion is a good idea. that will save you hard drive space and will make things move faster. In dealing with that much footage, it is good to save your rendered files to a different drive than your source files. I would recommend buying a few external hard drives that use either firewire 800 or 400. I believe Lacie makes some good ones, and those g-raid and g-drives are supposed to be good too. You can always buy the hard drive and enclosure seperately though too. Check out www.newegg.com and www.techsunny.com, they have some pretty good prices on there. And personally, I would say stick to western digital hard drives, in my experience they have been the most reliable. After you're done editing too, I believe premiere allows you to save a copy of your project that exludes all the un-used footage.
 
Re: How to Edit 25hrs simultaniously?

Sure you could capture all 25 hours at a low resolution and edit it...but there would still be the problems of having 25 hours of footage.

Sounds to me like you need to do some tape loggin'. Chances are that theres a good 10 hours of extraneous footage that you won't need at all, so you might as well log your tapes now and start to make decisions before you take the time to dump it all into a machine.

Remember capturing footage is realtime. You will have to spend 25 hours importing your clips, so it might be a good idea to start making those decisions offline before you begin to capture.
 
Re: How to Edit 25hrs simultaniously?

I finished a documentary last fall in which I had to winnow down 21 hours of footage into a 45 min finished project.

I use Vegas, so I can't speak to some of the techniques mentioned for Premiere. But here's some general advice:
* Buy 2 or 3 large HD's. My 21 hours took up about 450GB. Aside from captured footage, you'll need additional space for various renders.
* Once you have all your footage captured, run through it all, throwing out obvious no-go footage. When I did this, I went from 21 hours to about 4.5 hours.
* Most importantly, have a strong sense of how you want to organize your documentary. Then you can cut your project into sections and deal with each one. Conceptual design was the hardest part of the project for me. But having a plan made the subsquent editing choices much easier.

Good luck. You will learn so much in this effort that will make future projects go much better.
 
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