wedding dv-cam hell!

Lake Films

Lake Films

Veteran
Hey guys. My day job as a wedding editor has me going nuts. Meaning, I usually archive every finished job back onto DV-CAM tape. Well, I have about 20 of them piled up. I usually wait a month or so before going over the job with another. I recently had to do a fix-up and to re-enter the footage is a pain in the a...And, to boot it kept stopping for some reason. Ok, my question is, can I archive to a quicktime file and save the job on a harddrive with the same quality as on the timeline? This way I can just pull that file into FCP instead of inputting 2 hrs worth of dv-cam footage. Thanks!
 
I'm not 100% sure what your really asking? Could you clarify a bit better, and I am sure someone here (me included) can help point you in the right direction
 
Sorry, what I meant was, after I complete a job in FCP, instead of backing it up onto a DV-CAM tape, can I just send it out as a file for example a quicktime, to my hard drive? And if I ever need to retrive it, I just import the quicktime into FCP.
 
Short answer: Yes, long answer as follows...

Exporting a quicktime reference file (File > Export > Quicktime Movie) will write out a video of your entire timeline in whatever format you have chosen to edit your sequence, including audio and even markers if you so choose. This is a good option as far as quality is concerned, however it could generate some large files depending on codec used and length of the video. It also significantly speeds up the time needed to ingest the footage back into FCP to re-edit as the footage does not need to be recaptured, a process that degrades the quality of the footage due to generational loss.
 
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What are you trying to archive? The original footage, or the final edit? The original footage would presumably be archived on the original camera tapes. If you shoot tapeless, you should have some other archive program to keep the original footage safe, possibly to hard drive, DVD-ROM, etc. The final edit can be archived however is the most convenient for you.
 
Then yes...if your just trying to archive the final project, and not the raw footage, just export in FCP, then store on something like a RAID drive, so you have redundancy in your storage
 
I'd suggest that you archive the project with extended clips. Okay. I may not be making myself very clear, and that's because I use Media Composer and not FCP. So digging in a bit....

In Media Composer you can "consolidate" a sequence. This will backup an entire sequence (which includes titles and effects) to a single location. When consolidating you can define "handles" for each clip in the sequence. Handles give you extra frames at the start and end of each clip in the sequence. So what happens is, Media Composer exports only the footage contained in the sequence PLUS the number of frames you define for the handles. I typically do 60 frame handles. So if you need to go back and make a dissolve a second longer, you've got an extra 2 seconds on each side of the dissolve to work with. All the extra footage from clips that were not used, don't get backed up.

I would expect that FCP has the same kind of feature.
 
You can perform this task using FCP's media manager window (File > Media Manager) by using the copy function. It even enables you to specify the size of handles in frames & seconds.
 
Calomile said:
You can perform this task using FCP's media manager window (File > Media Manager) by using the copy function. It even enables you to specify the size of handles in frames & seconds.
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+++1 ! Do this and stop using a dying format as an archive. If you still love and trust tape then do both, but Media Manager is your friend. Take him out for a beer. Get to know him. He will help make your hell more of a purgatory. As you well know the weddings just keep coming.
 
And now some congratulations are in order! You can finally start to build that mountain of external hard drives that you always wanted!
 
kgimedia said:
+++1 ! Do this and stop using a dying format as an archive. If you still love and trust tape then do both, but Media Manager is your friend. Take him out for a beer. Get to know him. He will help make your hell more of a purgatory. As you well know the weddings just keep coming.
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Haha.

I don't know that I'd call dvcam a dying format quite yet. Yes its not the most popular format, but there are still ton's of decks for sale supporting dvcam, and every lab I use offers dvcam as standard for SD telecines. So it's for sure still in use
 
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