Logging Help

Can anyone suggest a book or website that has good efficient ideas about logging footage?

I have a 180 hours of footage (about 3,400 clips) of a documentary someone else shot and captured with no logging info just reel numbers as individual names of clips (Example: China 01-1, China 01-2, etc.).

I'm alone on this editing project and I've got plenty of time to do it. But before I dive in I just want to see how other people are doing it to help give me some ideas.

And though it hasn't been asked by the client (yet) I may want to log it in a way that I can easily export a Batch List. But the way I traditionally log footage, I use a lot of Markers with Comments, most clips with multiple Markers, but a Batch List doesn't show Markers or Comments inside the Markers. Exporting a Markers List as Text will only export one clip at a time and I haven't been able to figure out how to export a batch of clips with markers.

So I am open to new ideas of logging, I just need a good direction to go in. Any suggestions will be much appreciated and awarded with a Twinkie.

-- Jeff
FCP 7.0.1
OSX 10.6.2
Dual 3GHz Quad-Core Intel Xeon
5GB 667 MHz DDR2 of RAM

Shane Ross's DVD on Organization in FCP is what you need.

[training.creativecow.net]

Thank you, Tom. I will order it.

Where shall I mail the Twinkie to?

Thanks again.

-- Jeff

Shane'll take it. He prefers his Twinkies in money form, though. Because he's a boring old fart.

Well I'll just replace the filing with a buck fifty in dimes.

And have him send you the bill for three chipped incisors and a bicuspid? You're a braver man than I am.

Point taken, Jeff!

I'll redirect the Twinkie to you.

I can send you two Twinkies if you have any books or websites on efficient logging.

I saw the question when it first went up, and I've been wracking my brain ever since, mostly because I enjoy a nice Twinkie now and again. The closest thing I can come up with is only marginally useful at best. In his book In the Blink of an Eye, Walter Murch describes his logging process in some depth. He sits in dailies with a laptop and a Filemaker Pro database and logs each take of each scene. He goes into not-insignificant detail, with screen shots and everything if I remember correctly. (I lent my copy out a year ago, never got it back, and don't mind because that book deserves to be read.)

Unfortunately it's not really a how-to as much as it is just non-specific inspiration. It's a good way to start thinking about what you care about when you look at each shot.

Myself, I've never been much of a fan of using the software for logging. Final Cut's great and all; I'm a big fan. But a shot log is, for me, a highly idiosyncratic and personal thing. My process starts with making sure every shot is identified in some unambiguous way ? scene/take/angle, lab roll/shot, location/day/camera, whatever's appropriate to the project. Then I just take notes. Often on paper while I watch, from my couch with a coffee or whatever. There's something about the act of writing my notes down by hand, in a relaxed setting, that somehow makes them stick in my brain a little better. I end up remembering, vaguely or specifically, which shots I liked best, and that knowledge bubbles back up while I'm cutting.

But really, I can't emphasize the importance of watching every frame. I did an industrial PR doc a little over a year ago, and I was literally there for every moment of filming. And I still had to sit down and watch, and take notes. Because what I remembered happening on set didn't match what was actually recorded on the camera ? it was a no-budget operation, so there was no proper video village set up. I wasn't watching on a monitor, but rather watching the interview subjects directly. It's not at all the same as watching what actually gets filmed, so I sat down and watched it all. And took notes, and went from there.

Obviously with 180 hours of footage, that's a tall order. But you're going to have to bite the bullet and do it. If you've got the room in your schedule, I'd recommend doing no more than say four hours a day, in two-hour chunks in the morning and the evening. At least for me, my brain turns to mush after much more than a couple hours.

Of course, if you break it up like that, you're still looking at no fewer than forty-five consecutive days of nothing but watching rushes. Maybe it's time to bring in an assistant. Or a small army of assistants.

Wow! That's worth well more than 2 Twinkies. I'll see what I've got in the budget.

Thank you so much for the insight, Jeff, that really helps a lot. I think I'll give your suggestion a try. I originally was going to scrub thru it and just mark basic visual points with detailed markers in the interviews. But I think you're right, I just need to watch every frame and record what looks good to me.

You may be right about bringing in an assistant or twelve, and you're absolutely right about breaking up the viewing into chunks. I scrubbed thru a lot of video in seven hours straight and though I took notes I couldn't tell you what I saw during the last 3 hours.

Thanks again, Jeff. I appreciate all the advice.

-- Jeff

(Twinkies are in the mail.)

180 hours of footage ??? Good grief. The film I'm working on came in with about 80 and I thought that was bad enough.

I totally agree with Jeff here about not trying to watch more than four hours a day. More than that certainly turns my brain to mush. Particularly if it's just hours of a camera rolling waiting for something to happen.

Whatever happened to shooting discipline ? Anybody here remember the old 10:1 ratio ? Yes I know, grumpy old man, etc, etc but honestly the 'spray it everywhere' approach just sucks. "I was rolling at the time, so it must be in there somewhere", Actually, no. And even if it is, your brain was so addled from idle mindless rolling you probably didn't even notice.

A logging approach that works for me is watch the footage on FCP, making subclips and putting stuff in different bins as appropriate. At the same time I have a laptop running and type notes into a text file as the footage is playing down.

Now Mike, we must be understanding. How do we know Jeff's not working on a twenty-hour epic miniseries? Or, for that matter, an entire season of a TV series?

Okay, you're right. I didn't want to say it, but 180 hours is nuts. But somewhere buried in all that is a few hours of really choice material, and it must be found.

If you're working with interview footage, I can't sufficiently stress the importance of transcripts. If the budget allows, hire a transcription service. If it doesn't, recruit your friends. Your job will be infinitely easier if you have each taped segment transcribed. It won't replace log notes, but it'll reduce your logging burden a tiny bit, and it'll make actually finding those six seconds of that one guy saying that one thing he said so much easier.

I am too embarrassed to tell you how long (or rather how short) the client wants the video. And I am way too embarrassed to tell you how much (or rather how little) I'm being paid for this. The good news is that its due March 1 of 2011.

So, what's the maximum minutes allowed for Short Documentary? :-)

-- Jeff

Forty minutes, including credits.

I didn't mean to be offensive. I figured that if it was a mini-series, he would have said so.

This just happens to be something that bugs me intensely. I spent over twenty years working as a cameraman on docos and features - mostly shooting film, but a lot of video as well. As an editor these days, it drives me round the bend when I get hours of footage where there's nothing happening. I think it's part of the reality TV mindset. Thanks to NLE's it's not too difficult to sort the dross out - although incredibly time-consuming. The part that gets me is when someone shoots a doco in this style they invariably miss the vital moment when something happens. I mean it may be in the frame but they still haven't got an actual shot.

I know you didn't, and I didn't mean to give the impression that I was doing anything more than teasing.

You've got a very valid point, though. The advent of cheap shooting formats makes it more tempting to just let it roll ? which is a good thing, except when it's not. That projected I described before, the industrial PR piece? Part of the footage I had to watch included ? I'm not exaggerating here ? forty minutes of the company representative's media coach giving him off-camera notes. Forty minutes out of a 60-minute HDV tape.

I can understand the desire to not stop rolling, especially when you're shooting dual-system sound. But I wish there were a button on cameras that you could push that would automatically put up a "JUST IGNORE THIS" chyron so you could not bother logging it in post.

You definitely need assistants to sort out the footage. My practice isn't so much to watch everything before I edit. Usually I do scan through the rushes at that stage, so I have an idea of what I am working with as I'm cutting.

But I like to get the footage sorted out, usually by an assistant(s). This is more for project and media organization, and also to reduce the junk when I'm cutting (eg. director walking around on set, watching make up artists at work). I usually use the log notes column for scene/location description, and the assistants also try to look out for certain issues (eg. boom in frame, etc).

Then when everything is sorted into bins. I'll watch all the relevant shots to that scene or segment before I cut it.



www.strypesinpost.com

Quote
Jeff
I lent my copy out a year ago, never got it back, and don't mind because that book deserves to be read.

Wow, the exact same thing happened to MY copy of In the Blink of an Eye and I had the same reaction. I wonder if everyone's copy of that book is eventually loaned out and inadvertently stolen only to be loaned out again.

If so, I wait for the book to make it back to me.

PER TOPIC:

I like Jeff's approach a lot although I will admit that I'm a painfully slow at writing, so I typically log interviews with a combo of quick markers denoting topics and a transcript written in a database program which allows for keyword searches. If you have the budget, there are programs out there (designed for reality TV) that allow you to tag written transcripts to TC and tape info, even allowing proxy viewing of clips. If you don't have the money, filemaker or excel or even Word or Pages can work in a pinch.

For BROLL, I typically create a project with bins and clip info as I received it, organized by shoot date. This is merely for reference because oftentimes producers who are asking me for a specific shot or event remember the moment as occurring on a certain date of shooting rather than any useful context for me.

For my editing project, I copy and rename the master clips so they make more sense to me, creating bins that cover locations and events at those locations. If I need to, I'll throw a couple of markers in a clip to further divide the clip into sections.

Andy

Can Final Cut Logging data and notes be exported to another format - like Excel or FileMaker Pro.

I have a project coming up to digitize, log and capture 40 linear feet of stored boxes of film which are about 30 to 40 years old in both 16mm 35mm and reel to reel tape. It's for the archive of a film director who died around 1976 and it's material that belonged to him personally, and therefore now to his estate.

I have been wondering if there is a program designed for librarians which might allow the archive to cross reference searches etc. or if I can manage to create the archive in Excel or Filemaker.

Any thoughts greatly appreciated.

Best,

Harry.

Yes. Use the Export>Batch List function. It exports a tab delineated file that can be opened in a spreadsheet application. Anything that's in the Browser columns will appear there. Customize the columns to exclude the technical information if you wish.

Thanks to everyone who contributed, the ideas you've provided have gotten me thinking on a new approach of logging. In fact, I'm beginning to think my current method of logging might be flawed. As I mentioned, I live for Markers, either frame or duration, for all my clips but when I recently discovered that they don't show up in a Batch List I was floored. It was shortly after this that I discovered something else that doesn't work the way I thought. Doing a Find of a labeled Marker won't reveal it unless the bin that the clip resides in is currently open, in addition, the clip needs to be opened as well via the triangle at the left. That, to me, is not an efficient logging method, especially if you plan on searching for things that are hidden away in bins.

I know we all have our own method that works for us but I am quickly realizing mine is in desperate need of restructuring.

-- Jeff

Not everything in the Browser will show up. As I stated in my first post, Markers and Comments in the Markers do not show up. This issue is what started me down the path of searching for a new logging method that can easily show all my notes in a Batch List. Read my post above about searching for Markers in FCP. That's also an issue.

-- Jeff

Oh my god, Harry, that's incredibly cool. Sorry if you've already been down this road, and also sorry for getting off-topic, but you should totally call around to the big-name transfer houses in your area. If you can work out a deal to give them some free publicity, they might give you a steeply reduced rate on the transfers. Especially if they can run them unsupervised at night, between paying jobs.

What an amazingly cool job. I'd love to work on a project like that.

Sorry, by the time your last question came up it was disconnected from the beginning. In the question I answered there as no reference to the markers. My apologies for jumping in.