Tapeless workflow?

D

Denwa

Well-known member
Back in the days of tape, the cam assistant would mark the tape, and archive it. The shots were listed with time code etc.

What are you you all doing for a workflow in a soldstate age?

Since the footage gets dumped and the cards reused, how are you tracking what is what? Looking for workflow that makes sense.
 
In our workflow, each time you start a card clean it's a new "reel". So at the beginning of the first day, we're on reel1.

When that card fills up it goes to the AC (or whoever) who dumps it to an external drive while we're still shooting to the other card: reel2. It's important that you do this in a way that error checks, if you're shooting p2 you can use panasonic's utility, if you're shooting to SD or CF cards there are other tools or you can do it from the terminal on a mac.

Once the card is transferred and error checked, the person makes a duplicate copy of the external drive because you always want two copies of your footage. ( Once in a while, if we're pushing the limit of the other Card, we'll format the first card while the second copy is still running but do so at your own risk.)

Once there are two copies of the media from a card, we format it and put it back in rotation as reel3.

The most important thing to remember in this workflow is the slate, camera operator and AC must all be on the same page as to what card they are shooting to. Once in a while you end up shooting a take that spans cards; we just slate these as being on the first of the two cards it's on.
 
If you're using P2 or AVCCAM, you can program the metadata in the camera. It can record the production name, the scene name, the take number of each take, the shooter, the day & date, the camera serial number, all sorts of information that gets permanently embedded in the footage. This is all information that you can reference in post.
 
Depends on the camera... I'll give you the workflow for our recent 5D shoot:

We used traditional Slate and recorded dual system. The camera tags each recording with a unique sequence number. The AC did a camera report, and I was able to mark print takes and relate that to the unique number.

We made two copies on set and verified each before reformatting the card. We had 3 cards on set and never had any issue having one ready to go.

I am not cutting this movie, so I am not sure if we are cutting the online versions or proxies. I am color grading, so I am using DNxHD to go back and forth between my PC and the editor who is using FCP. Since we both have a copy of all the media, I simply grade the clips he has on the timeline, and hand him new ones. That way, we avoid having to work around EDL issues.

Once I have all the clips color and exposure matched, I am doing two grades. One for NTSC, and one for fllm-out or projection.
 
djkarn105 said:
how do you get it to automatically fill in the reel, etc in FCP?
Click to expand...
I don't use FCP because it traditionally works like a tape-based editor and won't come into the new tapeless age. However, it's my understanding that they actually added metadata support in the last revision. You'd have to ask an FCP user how it works, I don't know.
 
OK, So far I have been dumping the cards on

PRODUCTIONNAME\DAY1\DATE_X (where x is dump1 etc) type format.

I let AVCCAM viewer copy the SD card, then move the footage to the "Archive" structured like above.

I'll look into the metadata thing. Have a couple days till shoot day 3 on this flick. It has to be quick and easy. , and easy to track.

I have till Sunday to sort out my workflow as that is the next shoot day and I don't want workflow going askew.
 
For my last shoot I copied the data from the card to the HD and ran an auto-rename (using bridge) that labelled the shots MF09_date_time, as we were using a seperate audio recorder, we did the same with the audio files. This gave us a large set of files that could be sorted by name and automatically aligned the video and audio files to the nearest few seconds.

These were placed in a folder which runs an automatic backup to a seperate network drive.

I then organised the files in PPro so that each scene went into a different folder.

All this made editing of the images and then editing of the Audio in the DAW very simple.
 
-In the field we hire a 2nd AC that handles Slates and Data dump.
-We use a raid 1 system and also dump to a separate external drive.
-We log each card in our archive system and add metadata.
-Back in the shop the metadata and footage gets transfered to a server that backs up the content using VXA tape.
-Cards and drives are recycled, the important footage is sent to the deep archive server for long term storage.
-All content and footage is tracked using gridiron flow.
 
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