Multiple hard drive workflow

Hello,

Production will be sending me a drive on a weekly basis with that week's raw footage and audio from set. By the end of of 4 weeks, I will have 4 drives. The total of all drives will end up being around 12-16TB of data.

I'll be transcoding and syncing audio for each week and than do the offline edit.

On these drives, there will not be enough space to house the full offline edit; unless I split it across multiple drives (transcodes for each week, housed on that week's drive) and I'd rather not have all 4 drives hooked up to my machine constantly.

What is the best workflow for dealing with multiple drives in this fashion?

Since the transcodes will be much smaller, I can move the transcodes and audio to a new "edit" drive.
However, in the meantime may I do my initial transcoding and syncing to the media drive sent to me each week?

If I did that, what I'm trying to avoid is any sort of media offline when I eventually consolidate the project and move it to my edit drive
and begin cutting. I could start rough cutting on the media drive as well, but scenes are all out of order and I think I could possibly run into greater issues when I tried to combine all the scenes from all the drives.

Thank you

I don't know why people have a phobia about reconnecting files. If your file management is good, then the reconnect should be a matter of minutes. If your reconnect doesn't go well, then it tells you you have an organization problem.

> in the meantime may I do my initial transcoding and syncing to the media drive sent to me each week?

May you?
It's a question only you can answer. If the drives are just USB drives, it's out of the question -- it can't handle editing media quickly enough.
To me, it looks like a gigantic waste of time to do the ingest to those individual drives and then have to copy the media over to a larger centralized drive before you can work. It'd work better to ingest to the centralized drive, start working, and backup after each day's work. If these are "transport" drives, you also can't rule out the possibility that the camera or producer department may want them back very soon.


www.derekmok.com

They are usb3 drives so speed is fine and there are multiple backup copies, so I'll have them for the duration of the edit.

lets not make this too complicated:

transcode to an edit drive,
work off that.

only way to go, IMO

copy the audio to the edit drive as well,
and make and manage at least one back up of the edit drive.


cheers,
nick

So simple it makes sense