Media Managment for Long Form Projects

H

Hunter Starnes

Active member
Hey All,

My crew and I are in the editing stage of a documentary project right now. We have about two Terabytes of compressed AVCHD and Mp4 video with some Mpeg-2 thrown in there. Editing natively in Premiere Pro.

I am not used to handling this much video and some sort of media management needs to happen. We have mostly shot weddings and edited with a very basic folder structure.

We shot mostly tapeless with an HV20 used as backup. Right now, all the video is organized in folders by date. Inside those folders are the original folder structure from the cards.

We have a plan on renaming the files and also a good folder structure planned out. Our backups have the origanal folder structure and file names.

Here is the question: if we rename the files for editing, what do we do in the event of a disaster and we need to recover from our backups? Will we have to go through all the footage again and rename the files and then relink them in our NLE?

Is there a better solution?

Hope that was clear! Thanks in advance.

- Hunter
 
Have you thought of putting a searchable text file, with keywords inside each dated folder, but outside of the AVCHD file structure? This might help to identify the dated reels/folders you're after. I wouldn't rename the source files, unless you have a really foolproof method of doing so on this scale.
 
weismangroup said:
Check out program called CatDV. Sounds like it might help you log and organize. I haven't used it personally, but it has a big following over on the COW forums. Here's the link:

http://www.squarebox.co.uk/
Click to expand...

I will check that out, Thanks!

Have you thought of putting a searchable text file, with keywords inside each dated folder, but outside of the AVCHD file structure? This might help to identify the dated reels/folders you're after. I wouldn't rename the source files, unless you have a really foolproof method of doing so on this scale.
Click to expand...

That's a good tip, thanks!

I had two reasons for renaming the files. One was to make the clips easier to find. The other and main reason for renaming the files was to avoid my NLE getting confused when relinking media. I had this problem with Vegas 9 whenever I switched between my two editing machines. I had to relink each file separately, which was a real pain because many of the files had the same name, and if Vegas had done the linking automatically, then I would have multiple instances of the same clips.
 
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