Documentary Workflow

Hi everyone!

A fair warning ahead of time - this will be a somewhat long post so my apologies in advance. I'm trying to figure out a post workflow for a documentary and am looking for some advice. So if you have the time to offer up your thoughts, I'd greatly appreciate it!

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I have 125 hi8mm tapes, 30 miniDV tapes, 5 betacam sp tapes of 16mm transfer, and will have some HD footage (most likely from p2 but possibly from tape). The HD footage has not been shot yet.

I will be cutting on final cut pro 5 - whatever the latest version is. I'll be starting on a 17" powerbook and will eventually migrate over to an intel - either an imac or a mac pro.

At first, b/c the hi8 tapes are so old, I was going to dump these onto either dvcam or miniDV which would then become my new masters (this process I would do on my own with decks, while I logged and captured other material). This would give me the timecode I need in case anything were to go wrong with my drives down the line. The 30 miniDV tapes I would import directly at dv res. The betacam sp I would have transferred to dvcam. Same for the HD unless it were from p2 in which case I think I could make copies of the quicktimes using dv compression. This way I would either edit in dv resolution OR i would import/convert using final cut's offline jpg mode thus saving a ton of space.

HOWEVER, I'm seriously considering a workflow that I've never done before. Since hard drive space is so cheap, I'd like to capture all hi8 tapes directly to the computer at dv res using the sony gvd800 deck w/ firewire out - the hard drives would then become my masters for the hi8. Because I would have no timecode information, I would make backup copies of all my drives. In the event that something went wrong with my main drives, I could swap in the back ups and relink. Everything else would go as above. ie capture miniDV at dv res, convert betacam sp and HD to dvcam and import at dv res. For the online HD or SD master, we would only need to worry about bringing the betacam sp and hd back in at higher res since the miniDV and hi8 footage would be in a optimal resolution for those formats already.

So...

1) does this make sense? My gut is that converting the hi8 tapes to dvcam would be a waste of time and money. Especially since i could protect myself with redundant drives.

2) if so, i'm assuming i'd be doing quite a bit of subclipping. Since these drives would essentially become my new masters, i'd hate to use the media manager to get rid of some of the material (which is what i'm used to doing). Does anybody have experience with subclipping? Is there anything I need to be careful of/look out for when using subclips?

3) anyone have any experience editing that much footage at dv res in one project? I'm gonna guess that we'll have at least 200 hours of footage. At 12-15 gb/hour for dv res, this translates into 2-3Terabytes of information. Can daisy chained drives handle this? If so, what brand and size drives do you recommend. I could go with 4-6 500gb g-drives, or maybe a couple of 1TB mybook drives. (of course i'd have to have double those numbers for my redundant back-ups).

Thank you for your time! Hope this isn't too much of a ramble!

E-mail me directly and we can discuss further. I have experience in this area and can offer advice.


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No, no, share, share.

Uh, I had to pay consultants to learn a lot of what I do know, and on the last show I worked on we had mixed formats of PAL VHS, DV, DVD and BetaSP. It took a bit of figuring how to get them all to work in a DVCPRO HD 720p 23.98 timeline. I can't pay for advice from someone then turn around and dole it out for free. Unfair to them, and unfair to me.

Sorry Tom.


www.shanerosseditor.com

Listen to THE EDIT BAY Podcast on iTunes
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Well then, some free but less valuable advice.

If it were me...

and if I really cared about this project and thought it had a future...

I would go to some lengths to avoid the DV codec. Especially for the sake of the bulk of your material, which is on a very noisy format. That noise is likely to turn into things you don't recognize after DV compression.

I would say you need DVCPro50 at a minimum. Uncompressed would be great but isn't going to be practical with that much material... on a PowerBook.

The DV and HD you'll want to bring in in native formats from tape.

If it were me I would transfer all the Hi8 to tape as DVCPro50. The tape is cheap (especially in these quantities), and you could do everything with a rented or borrowed deck in... a week of interrupted sleep, perhaps.

Your capture alone is a huge project no matter how you slice it. Don't waste your time by committing all that time to inferior results (DV).

Aside: Consider having all this (at least the Hi-8) done by a service agency or another producer with a slow month. They'll have the deck and the resources. They hand you a pallet of tapes and a box of drives at the end, and you start editing.

Once it's on tape those tapes are your backup but also a resource. Because you have a solid backup you don't have to be quite so worried about redundant drives and buying and managing a carload of drive space. You can delete or take offline things that you're pretty sure you don't need but "might come in handy", knowing that getting them back is just a few steps away at any moment.

You're going to need to feel comfortable deleting, putting off line, and media managing because having that much material online - even in a kazillion separate project files - is going to be Very Taxing on the system and on your brain.

You can still do the whole-tape subclipping, but I would strongly suggest chopping and Media Managing each tape or group of tapes as soon as it comes in. This will save space, system load, and get you familiar with the material.

A whole other subject will be the project files. Regardless of how you go at this you will need a system of multiple project files. Perhaps one for each tape or group of tapes (or subject category), and one for each sequence. Read up on this and get comfortable with it, because you simply can't do what you're asking for without it.

You will get many responses about specific drives. I'm very happy with Maxtor 1TB Turbo RAIDs, which I use as RAID 1 for a redundant 500GB but are more commonly used as 1TB.

Sure you can use a bunch of drives but you will be asking for trougble down the line. Don't try to get and keep all that media online. It's just too much. Make sure you're backed up (the coded tapes), and then slice and dice.

To sum up:

- stay away from DV, in favor of DVCPro50 (or uncompressed in an ideal world!)
- use multiple project files
- trim to presumed-usable media as you capture
- don't try to keep everything online

...

Shane probably has all the ducks in a row and it'd be well worth engaging him, but in the interest of sharing maybe some of us can tackle lil' pieces of interest.

[At first, b/c the hi8 tapes are so old, I was going to dump these onto either dvcam or miniDV which would then become my new masters (this process I would do on my own with decks, while I logged and captured other material).]

I like this idea and I've tried to do this with clients whenever possible, but if you're mastering to DVCPro50 do what Braker suggests and have them bumped up. Because storage is so cheap these days, I like to dupe everything from varied formats into the final mastering format before logging and capturing.

A transfer house is a good workflow for two reasons. If you do it yourself you may be tempted to reuse old tapes. I've just encountered the delicious experience of misaligned biasing heads between a client's camera dupe and my Sony deck, which enabled me at one or two points to enjoy both relevant footage and irrelevant older program footage poking through randomly!! Yuch! When a transfer house does it, they'll use either completely erased tape or fresh stock-- hopefully the latter, and you pay a little more. Second, if they do it wrong, such as forgetting to jam source timecode (if you need it) they get to do it again for free.

But listen up! If you work on a slower machine, or on a huge project which could easly run out of storage, nothing prevents you from renting a DVCPro deck, digitizing to a compressed format like DV for offline editing. The source timecode will come through. The offline/online paradigm is stll robust, as there are now many online FCP suites, and solves many problems, like high-rez storage, avoiding taxing your CPU as it lugs around 8- or 10-bit uncompressed timelines, the dreaded SBBOD on multiple streams, etc. FCP still loves and cherishes DV for actual editing, regardless of its new capabilities or the merits of DV as an online format (and for many, especially DVCAM, it is!). In any event, you store your DVCPro50 masters safely until the online. Most all your effects will come through as you did them in the offline, titles, audio levels, etc. Your online editor will want to rebuild some items but generally, it's a great workflow.

Whatever you do, DON'T use Photo-JPEG. It's terrible at any meaningful compression and will panic clients and buyers reviewing the offline.

My .02.

- Loren
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