Looking For a "Standard Practices" Document, Workflow, Redundancy, etc.

[Chris Lawes]

Hi Everyone,


Would really appreciate some help on this matter. I am designing a production-wide unified workflow document so everyone is on the same page and important redundancy/safety/checklists/etc are being followed.


My first question is does there exist any "official" set of documents on procedures and best practices in the film industry?
Somekind of ISO 27001 or ASC published documents? I know some of these exist for physical safety like OSHA but what about things like when a memory card is offloaded, how many redundant locations it's copied to, how files are named according to camera/operator/production, etc.


My second question is can anyone recommend a document, book, guide, etc. of written best practices for film production or share their own practices?


I know there may not be "one way" that's agreed upon but at some point you need to decide on a "one way" for a specific project at least.
I am looking for thought-out procedures and practices on both field production and post production workflows.


Thank you very much in advance for your shared experience and expertise!


- Chris Lawes

 

[sonofaresiii]

As soon as a memory card is pulled, it gets red tape across the slot (so there's no way I can use it without removing the tape). Once it has been transferred to TWO drives, the red comes off and green goes on. No card without green tape goes in the camera. I'll almost always get a third back-up of it, but once it's in at least two locations the red tape can be replaced with green.

I went through too many times of "So this card is good to be formatted?" "Should be." "Well is it or not?" "That's the one you handed me earlier, right?" "....let's go check." and then we all stand around for ten minutes while someone makes sure it's been downloaded. Far too many people on set think "Should be" is an acceptable answer to whether or not a card can be formatted, the tape gets rid of all that uncertainty.
Oh, and only ONE person removes the red tape-- the guy doing the downloads.

 

[jax_rox]

I'm not sure if there are any 'best practices' documetns around, but we can give you some ideas of our best practices if you post what sort of things you're looking for.

In terms of card backup, standard practice I've observed is to have a RAID 1, or RAID 5 cage setup, which the card first gets dumped to using software like Shotput Pro that provide checksum verifications so you know it's definitely there. From there it gets transferred to two other drives direct from the card. The tape system mentioned above is the way things are labelled. All computers and drives are connected to a UPS so if at the end of the day you have a 1 hour transfer that has 5 minutes left on it and everyone starts wrapping, someone accidentally pulls out power to the wrangling setup, and you have enough time for the transfer to finish and shutdown, rather than having to plug everything back in and start the hour-long transfer again.

At the end of each day, one drive goes with the Producer, one goes with someone else (maybe the DP or Director) and the RAID setup goes with the DIT or Data Wrangler, who usually provides it. THey keep a backup of everything for x amount of days after wrap, usually agreed upon beforehand, and often they'll call the Producer to make sure they're cool to format before they do.