Mixed Media

Hi,

I am about to work on 3 one hours shows made from archive and some interviews specially shot on green screen. The project is NTSC 16:9 to be delivered in HD. The problem, we have every type of media and codec on the planet! HD, SD, DV, handy cam and even phone cam plus anything else you can think of.

What thoughts does anyone have of the best way to approach this? I am working with another editor, and for reason too complicated to go into (the production are too mean!) we will not be on a shared media system. We will each have our own storage drives. But we will need to swop programmes between ourselves at various times. Having been in that position before and having had problems relinking the media I would like to avoid that pitfall again.

Apart from the obvious such as having common reel numbers and identical sequence settings does anyone have any suggestions to make the edit smooth and trouble free (as ever they can be!)

Should we use compressor to convert all the various media to one acceptable codec for FCP?
Should we keep the specially shot interviews on a separate drive and just down res for the offline?

Any suggestion gratefully received.

>The project is NTSC 16:9 to be delivered in HD.

It's not going to look great. Try to use a hardware converter like a Teranex or Alchemist if it is in budget, and especially if you have to go from PAL to NTSC.


>Should we keep the specially shot interviews on a separate drive and just down res for the
>offline?

You definitely should convert your footage to an editable format like ProRes before editing, and not convert in FCP either.


>Having been in that position before and having had problems relinking the media I would like to
>avoid that pitfall again.

I'm usually quite strict about making sure the media is named properly without illegal characters, and if we're sharing files, nobody renames the files.

There are some options:
[www.assistedediting.com]
[www.videotoolshed.com]



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