Editing with a distant producer

Hi guys,

I am based in France and have to work with a producer who is in Singapore and wanted your feedback on our workflow to see if you had ideas to get a quicker turnaround to produce these interviews.

I work on the latest version of FCS on a Mac Pro Octocore.

Here is the current workflow:
Once the filming is done here, I digitize the main tape (usually the interviewee) in Final Cut, then export the rushes in H264 straight from Final Cut Pro using Compressor and its new feature which enables me to automatically upload it to an FTP server (thanks Apple!).

The producer in Sg looks at the video, makes a transcript of the bits of the interview he wants to keep and then send me this as a Word document with the transcript of the interview as he wants it to be edited.

I then do the editing using his notes and adding the 2nd camera with the interviewer.
Once this is done, same process again: FCP to Compressor to FTP server.

He has another look at the edited video and usually gets back to me for the fine tuning.

I have been already gaining a lot of time thanks to the new feature built in Compressor but was wondering if you would see some room for improvement here except for me to move in Sg ;-)


Also, cherry on the cake, he will also be doing interviews in Sg and wants me to do the editing here; what I thought was getting a Network Raid storage here on my LAN (Synology RS407, 4TB capacity), so that he could digitize his rushes in Sg (he also has a FCP station) in DV format (they are usually not so long, 10-15 minutes max), upload them to my Network storage so that I would only have to copy them to my Mac Pro, we would then follow the usual process.

What is your advice?
Final Cut Server does not seem to be the adequate solution in our case? Neither Digital Heaven Movie Logger?

Do some of you face the same constraints, i.e. work with distant producers, how do you then handle this process?
I would be curious in sharing experience on this.

An interesting idea that i haven't had time to fully test yet is playing your timeline out live over something like Skype.

I know that I can play video out of my deck to Skype and any person (with enough bandwith) connected in a video chat can see it. They can also talk live to make comments while they watch.

This would save a ton of time on compressing, uploading, downloading , note taking and so on. Just do it all live.

Along the same lines as Jude's thoughts, I myself wonder whether you need to use H.264 for the encoding. It's a very taxing codec, takes a long time to encode. It looks great, but do you really need that much quality? Since you're doing just interviews, I might have chosen just the older MPEG-4 format instead and save on encoding time on hours of footage.


www.derekmok.com

Any chance he can ship you the Singapore tapes once he has captured them on his end? Is the price of a DHL worth it versus the upload time of all the interviews? Because if you two had matching projects and media then you could just send him the project file (smaller than an exported Quicktime and no encoding involved) and he would just re-link the media to the same clips on his system and watch it on the timeline.

JK

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SCQT! Self-contained QuickTime ? pass it on!

I think the time difference makes the live issue a bit hard to work with, as well as video chats not being of the highest quality or framerate, from what ive seen tho i havent tried it much so i cant say for certain but i doubt the quality is too high.

H.264 doesnt take that long on an Octo, especially if you do a single pass VBR. I've compressed 5hrs of content in 40 mins. That works well enough for me. Especially if you're sending it FTP, you'd want the smallest file sizes possible.

Your workflow sounds about what i do with my producer in London tho could you explain the FTP server connect in Compressor? Somehow i've never known that was an option and im in Compressor quite a bit. I'd be a great feature to have so i could sleep in more in the mornings instead of waking up to upload last nights work...l

=S=

I tried this last night with Ben. He's in the UK and I'm in Australia. I was able to stream live TV to Ben, which he said appeared to be running at about 15fps at his end. Also, since I was using a deck connected via firewire, I was not able to send sound out of my timeline.

However, Ben was able to play off his timeline to me, using a USB input routed through his deck's headphone jack, which looked fine, ran at normal speed and sounded fine. By 'fine' I mean about mini DV quality.

We could also talk at the same time using Ben's setup, which included using a Roland Edirol USB mike (I think?)

Usually when I show (good) producers anything, what they are interested in is the structure, the placement of thngs in the story and on the screen. Of course it wouldn't be any good for final screenings, or QC, but it was plenty good enough at my end to be able to comment on structure.

Of course, as Scott points out, time zones aren't a big help. Still, OZ to the UK or America is OK for a few hours a day.

Hi Scott,

Actually I used to hate Compressor and Compressor 2 as I found them not flexible at all and slow in addition (I used to work with Cleaner but they have stopped maintening it and then moved to MPEGstreamclip) and I have been extrely surprised by Compressor 3.

This feature I am mentionning can be configured in the destinations folders, you can then choose to upload to .mac account or to an FTP server as well as to different folders. When in your settings pane, you just need to choose which destination preset you want to use.

it can also send an email once the job is processed.

you can read this in the manual:
http://manuals.info.apple.com/en/Compressor_3_User_Manual.pdf

Page 306

The method I've used is to create a Droplet from my FTP program (in this case Transmit) then under the 'Actions' tab in the Inspector I check 'Execute Applescript...' and select the droplet. Compressor finishes compressing the file and then activates the FTP script.

I think both ways are valid (Script vs. Destination). My understanding is that setting the remote site as a Destination means that the file is not saved locally on the machine at all (right?) while using the droplet script allows you to save the file to your drive AND upload it too. However the script method only works for one file at a time; last time I tested it with multiple files and ftp scripts only the first file on the list got sent, the rest were ignored.

HTH,
JK

_______________________________________
SCQT! Self-contained QuickTime ? pass it on!

Quote
John K
My understanding is that setting the remote site as a Destination means that the file is not saved locally on the machine at all (right?)

Right

There are various tools for this sort of thing one being SyncVue.

[www.syncvue.com]

Michael Horton
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Walter Murch recommends the PIX System.

At 4:53 of this video, he describes what it is and how they used it in Youth Without Youth and that it was used in the film Zodiac to distrubute dailies. He called it "a crypted FTP site with a film friendly data base."
[www.macvideo.tv]

Here's their website:
[www.pixsystem.com]

--
Eric Harnden
Quintessential Studios
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[wordpress.quintessentialstudios.net]
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