Saturday
16Jan2010

Avid 4.0 P2 Workflow, Part 1: Importing

My current project is a feature documentary with about one hundred hours of footage, all completely tapeless. We have P2 media from hard-drives, originally shot on the HVX-200A and HPX-500, along with quicktime files shot on the Canon 5D. It sucked, not because the hardware and software couldn't handle it, but because no one on the project (including me) knew how to adjust our tape-based sensibilities into a tapeless environment.

Most P2 guides I've found are limited to small projects, whose sources are manageable enough to keep in your head or in a speadsheet. Larger projects need a system in place, so you don't have to track source media, but you can find it by moving through the system you've set up.

1. Familiarize Yourself With the Process

Avid has a really helpful PDF file on their site, called the "P2 & Avid AMA Workflow Guide" that covers the bare-bones basics. It will get you started, but there are a few details that I'm going to get into that are beyond the scope of that document.

2. Organize Your Source Media Beforehand

On this job, the P2 media was brought into the system before I arrived on the job, and it was brought in from an extremely disorganized Firewire drive. It might not matter on small projects, but on big ones, importing from disorganized sources will come back to bite you. Organizing your P2 sources is the same as keeping an organized shelf of tapes, or numbering the still photos you import. Here is an example of my ideal folder structure (click to enlarge):

 

Going from left to right (which goes deeper into each folder), we start with the shoot date, followed by the camera, followed by a folder for each card that was used, and in each card folder we have the actual dump of the footage from the card.

3. Link to an Entire Camera's Worth of Footage At Once

Most (if not all) P2 cameras support something called "clip spanning". Clip spanning allows you to load two cards into a camera at once, and if the first card fills up, the recording continues uninterrupted on the second card. What this means for post-production is that if you were to import Card 1 but not Card 2, and a scene spanned both those cards, the part of that scene that lived on Card 2 would appear offline.

For this reason, you should import an entire camera folder at a time. Avid will read the spanned clips properly and you won't get mysterious partially-offline clips.

4. Save Your Source Folder as a Custom Column

If you weren't already aware of this, here's a fun tip: You know all those bin columns like "Start", "Duration", "Modified Date", etc.? Scroll all the way to the right of your bin, move your mouse to the right of the current headings until your mouse arrow turns into a text-entry cursor, and click. You now get to type in a custom heading.

I used "AMA VOLUME" as my heading, but yours belong to you; you get to use whatever you want. Now, click the "Drive" column heading to highlight that entire column, and hid Command-D on a Mac, or Control-D on Windows to duplicate this entire "Drive" column into your new custom heading. You'll eventually consolidate these clips to your Avid Mediafiles folder, and Media Composer doesn't seem to save the source location in any place you can see it. If you need to go back to the source for any reason, having this saved custom heading will save you a lot of time.

5. Consolidate, and Keep Your Old Clips

You can watch footage that's linked to as an AMA Volume, but if you're going to cut with it long-term, you're going to need to consolidate this media to your Avid Mediafiles folder. Select your linked clips, and Consolidate, linking your master clips to the new drive.

When it's complete, copy your master clips that are linked to your new drive to new bins, and work out of those new bins. I separated out "tape bins" by date, camera and load, so that it would look like the tape-based projects my editor and I were used to. Take your original bin, which has clips linking to the AMA Volume and the new drive, and tuck away in a safe place. You'll need it to recover if something goes wrong down the line.

6. Cut, Mix, and Be Merry

Now you're ready to make the magic happen! My next entry in this series will be about recovering media that gets knocked offline, which turned out the be trickier than expected.

Saturday
09Jan2010

FreeDocumentaries Lets You Watch, Well, Free Documentaries

(via Lifehacker)

It's not just a clever name. Newly discovered website FreeDocumentaries hosts streaming versions of documentaries that have legally been licensed for free viewing. And it's not a poorly-organized dump of some old archive, but actually includes popular movies. There are three Michael Moore films, Morgan Spurlock's Super Size Me, and the under-appreciated The Power of Nightmares from the BBC.

The single thread connecting the documentaries is their political-mindedness. All of the films either advocate an issue or or give the viewer information on current events. So, no Anvil! The Story of Anvil for you.

Friday
08Jan2010

The Cable Connector Quiz

Mental Floss is hosting a cable and connector quiz. There is a consumer and personal computer bent among the questions, but anyone working in television in a technical capacity should be able to guess them all. I did manage to get 100%, but I'm both a computer geek AND a video geek.

Saturday
26Dec2009

Automating Off-Site Project Backups

 

I'm paranoid about backing up. But that paranoia has saved me more than once. On my first gig as an Assistant Editor, suddenly all of our source bins, hundreds of them, went corrupt for a reason I still don't know. Luckily, I had been backing up every night and was able to restore a clean copy from a weeks-old backup.

I'm also a huge fan of automation, so lately I've been toying with automation in order to stay backed up. I've got two scripts to use, one for Windows and one for Mac OS X, that will automatically copy, compress, and backup your projects online, using the free Dropbox service. Dropbox is free, secure, and off-site, meaning your project files are safe even if your facility burns to the ground. I'm still working on how to back up all of your media online, but I'm getting close to a solution.

Anyways, check the scripts I've got here. You'll need to open them in a text editor and take a look at the contents. The locations of the projects are set up for my computers, and they're currently set up to use Dropbox, which assumes your bay is connected to the internet, which is not necessarily a safe assumption. You can modify them in the text editor to work with your setup very easily, though it will require some knowledge of the command-line.

Thursday
24Dec2009

Commitment to Resolution

This guy has it. In a strange twist, his wife's plate reads MRS480I.

(Spotted at the Best Buy on Pico and Sawtelle)