Adventures in videography

My workflow for transferring the footage from my EX1 to my editing machine is fairly straightforward, here’s a quick rundown of the way I handle it.

My Mac Pro is configured with a dedicated internal hard drive for storing the raw footage I shoot. I have named this drive “Video Store” and it’s a 1TB drive. I also have a 500Gb “G-Raid” external firewire 800 drive that is used for storing and handling footage that has been imported into Final Cut Pro. I have this drive set as the location for all render files and assets needed in Final Cuts preferences.

So, after a shoot I connect the EX1 to my mac using it’s USB connection and when the SxS cards appear on the desktop I open them up and check which of them contains the footage I’ve shot. Then I create a suitable named folder on my Video Store drive. 

[update 7-3-09]

I used to copy the BPAV folders to my drive using the mac finder but some people have reported that the video files can become corrupt when using this method. Sony recommend using their Clip Browser software to do this and as of version 2 they have added a preference to perform a CRC check after the copy has completed to make sure the files are complete. I’ll be using this method from now on.

The CRC check option can be found in the Clip Browser preferences as seen below.

If I’ve used more than one SxS card then I create nested folders to store the them, something like…

Once the BPAV folder is copied I eject the SxS cards, disconnect the EX1 and then switch it off. I do not erase the clips on the SxS cards until I need to reuse the cards just incase I need to revert to the recorded data. I’ve not had any problems yet, but it’s best to be safe.

When it comes to editing, I create a new project in final cut and save it. By doing this Final Cut knows which project to associate  imported clips with, if you don’t your clips will be saved in an ‘Untitled Project’ folder. I then use the ‘Log & Transfer’ function in Final Cut and select the appropriate folder on my Video Store drive.

In order to use ‘Log & Transfer’ with XDCAM-EX media you’ll need to have updated Final cut to the latest version and installed the various Sony apps, including the Log & Transfer Plug-in. I wrote a short step by step for getting Final Cut ready to use XDCAM-EX media.

The Log & Transfer window then shows all of the clips which are contained within that folder. From this point you can mark in and out points, make log notes and import just the clips you want to use, but because I normally delete bad takes on the camera as I’m shooting I tend to end up importing all the clips in their entirety.

By importing the clips, Final Cut converts them to XDCAM-EX quicktime files and stores them in the appropriate project folder (if I saved the project) on my G-Raid drive. It does not have any effect on the original files on the Video Store drive which are retained in their original state.

By working this way you are inherently adding a little redundancy to your files, you not only have the original source files in the BPAV folders, but you also now have quicktime files of the same clips on another drive (at least the ones you decided to use anyway).

I also the Time Machine app on my mac to backup both the “Video Store” and “G-Raid” drives to external USB drives. When these external drives become full I simply store them and purchase bigger drives giving me some off-line backups of my footage incase of drive failure.

My methods are by no means ideal for everyone, but for my usage it provides a usable workflow and suitable backups should something fail.