What are you doing with all that Epic footage?

[Max Kaiser]

We're a mainly corporate video house that shoots most everything on our Epic. Problem is, we are winding up with HUGE projects. This is no problem on our XSAN while the project is live, but when it comes to archiving these huge projects, it is becoming a big problem. What I'd like to do is some sort of media managing - is this possible?

Like this sort of thing...

Shoot in 5k
Basic Color in RCXPro
Prores nearly everything
Edit in FCP
Go back to RCXPro for a few shots I want to recolor, color rest in FCP or color
THEN
Archive ONLY the R3D that I'm using in the edit and handles, and be able to throw away the rest.

I know you may say that is crazy, but at what clients are paying us for the experience of shooting on RED we cannot afford to keep each project (which is about 1TB now) in archives. If I could just keep the R3D's of the shot parts that I used, then I could always make stills of them, recolor, etc. but I just can't bring myself to throw out ALL the R3D's!

Does RCXPro offer this? We've tried using the import xml but gotten pretty shoddy results. Didn't clipfinder used to do this?

Thoughts?
Max

[Alan Skinner]

1TB?

Disks are cheap! Even with the cost being unusually high still.

What we do is clean up a project down do what we don't have to have and drop a bare disk in an eSata docking station. (run a little usb fan over the drive to avoid over heating). We transfer to two disks for redundancy. One goes in the fire proof safe here and another goes to a bank deposit box.

If a project needs 750 gigs of storage, I use 750s. It if needs 2TB etc. Total cost for two 750s is about 150 USD. Less if you buy in bulk. You can get 5400 RPM drives as you don't need speed, just space.

That way, we can keep pretty much everything. If one disk freezes up in a few years, the other will probably be OK. I plan to spin them once every 3-5 years in any case so the grease doesn't solidify.

I do all of this because I hate tape drives.

The eSata docking station is about $30 USD.

[Max Kaiser]

I guess you are right - i should just suck it up. We do a similar deal with harddrives for archiving. I was just wondering if there was a decent way of doing an FCP-like media manage on R3Ds.

Max

[BigLu]

You mention you shoot 5K
what compression are you shooting with also.

I may have some suggestions you may find attractive.

Luis

[Steve Sherrick]

Alan, spin those drives more often. Stiction could happen a lot sooner. it should at the very least be done months apart, not years apart.

[Max Kaiser]

Usually we shoot about 7:1 or so. And to make matters worse, we've fallen in love with shooting everything in high-frame rates and then saying - Oh well, we'll ramp it in post if we don't like it - crazy.

Also, I should point out that we're shooting about 10 projects a month at this size (1TB), so even with HDs really cheap, it really adds up - and none of my customers seem to understand and don't want me tacking more stuff on their bill - :). Also, I can say in like 5 years I've never gone back to the R3D's for anything, so if I could just keep the R3D's from the final cut, I know I'd be more than covered, and be using only about 1/10 of the space I am currently.


Max