Setting up to digitize 300 hours of footage

I am about to start post production on a documentary with 300 hours of mini DV footage. (1 hour =12 gb/300 hours =3600gb) We will have 3 FCP systems (2 G5's and a powerbook G4) set up at our house and want each system to injest 100 hours of footage. I'm trying to figure out what the least expensive and most reliable option is. We will have 3 people logging, digitizing and cutting sections of the movie until we get the cut down to about 10 hours, then one editor will take all the footage onto one system.

I am trying to find the most cost effective, efficient way to do this.

since miniDV's are notorious for having TC breaks it seems like it might not be worth the savings to digitize at a lower resolution. we'd just have to pay for a lot of manual digitizing later and a huge headache. However, the cost of the redundant array's is prohibitive too!
what to do?
does anyone have a link to a review of drives so I can figure out which ones are most reliable? maybe we'll just have to buy 4 terrabytes without the redunancy and hope for the best? seems like such huge risk and still a lot of money!
does anyone know anyone who's gone through this before that I could talk to?

Thanks!

Rent an Xserve RAID (up to 7 Terabytes)?

[www.apple.com]

When life gives you dilemmas...make dilemmanade.

DV is actually more like 13GB per hour. You will need about:

Raw footage
13GB/hour x 300 hours = 4TB
+
Possible movie file at DV quality
13GB/hour x 2 hours = 26GB
+
Handles = UNKNOWN
+
Render files = UNKNOWN (effects-intensive?)
+
20 per cent free space contingency
400GB
-----------------------------------------------
5-6TB.

Given that much footage, you may want to at least consider capturing at offline quality. I don't disagree that it's much more time-efficient to capture at online quality now; it's just that you have soooo much footage and maybe only 10 per cent will end up in the final show.

My recommendation is to hire very good, professional loggers/assistant editors who know how to get around timecode breaks and log properly for batch capture. Don't go for those just-out-of-film-school-learning-the-ropes amateurs that producers seem to love so much. Get really good assistant editor. That way offline capturing won't be a problem. Find one tape with lots of timecode breaks and do a test. Check tape-clip timecode matching regularly.

> maybe we'll just have to buy 4 terrabytes without the redunancy and hope for the best?

When you have that much footage, it's gonna cost you more to recapture all of it than to buy enough storage to back it up:

300 hours = 30 days of 10-hour days of an assistant recapturing the footage = A three-to-four-week delay in the project. It'll do real nicely when it comes to that Sundance deadline.


www.derekmok.com

Slightly off topic - but how much does a good Edit Assistant look to be earning over there at the moment??

Between $1200 and $1500 a week...here in LA. Some can be had for less, but you did qualify the question with "good" assistant editor.


www.shanerosseditor.com

Listen to THE EDIT BAY Podcast on iTunes
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Hi:

Have you considered going old school and doing a paper cut? I work in documentaries and to me, it seems counterproductive to try to work with so much footage in FCP. I edited a doc about 2 years ago that had about 100 hours of footage. FCP bogs down a bit when you throw so much footage at it, although this has improved (cut that version on FCP 3.12, I think?), but still.

I would at least script a detailed outline and then just bring 50-75 hours onto the drives. I can't imagine trying to edit with such a massive amount of footage to go through would be any fun, you need to boil it down a bit.

Best,

Dan

I would just capture at full rez without redundancy and hope for the best. Sound like your an indie project and can't afford good raid drives. Check these out. Cheap...

[eshop.macsales.com]

-CHL

Chi-Ho Lee
Film & Television Editor
Apple Certified Final Cut Pro Instructor

I second Dan's suggestion. Too often we just thow all our footage onto a drive and then sift through it, when the thought process becomes sharper when we actually do our own logs and make a paper edit with the plan of making an EDL for transfer.

Too bad this is denigrated as "old school," but i understand.

HarryD