Can I delete .rdm folder without problems down the road? i know you're gonna say no..

[dan freshman]

Hello,

Shooting a project on the red one mx with 2 interviews a day and only 1 red drive (320gb). I am aware that most people say to keep the entire folder structure in tact and I would like to but I feel like its hard to organizationally. Since I have only one red drive, I am dumping footage at the end of the day which means both interviews are on that drive. I would like to have folders in finder for each interview inside of folders by day because folders by day helps, but helps less than having it organized by interview subject. I use shotput pro to dump to three external drives and have been adding one set of .rdc folders first into a designated folder for that interview than dragging the second set of .rdc folders from within the same .rdm folder to the next interview folder. is this going to cause major problems down the road? I have only done this one day so far out of about 30 so could easily change my workflow with minimal problems but am wondering if this method is horrible or not.

thanks for any advice,
dan

 

[Terry VerHaar]

I'd find another way if I were you. Maybe try experimenting with aliases? I k ow in FCP-X I can do a lot of reorganizing with keywords. What NLE are you using?

 

[Mikael Lubtchansky]

As long as you keep the .rdc (RED DIGITAL CLIP) folder structure intact (with sub _00x.R3D in place and any associated .RMD sidecar file) you are good to move this around as you wish on your external drives. The .rdm (RED DIGITAL MAG) folder with all the .rdc clips inside is only needed on the RED DRIVE itself for in camera recording but afaik is not needed further down the road (the other files it contains like the camera log file are either used in camera only or useful when having some issue to send diagnostic to RED techs...)

so yes, keep the clips structure (rdc) but forget the rdm on your offloaded copies if needed...

 

[Brian Merlen]

just put your files into folders that are organized. for instance when I am on a set I make "mag 1, mag 2, mag 3" and just dump the whole thing in there. another way is to log the clips within an edit program, you can rename in there, it wont affect the folder structure of the r3d...

 

[Brian F Kobylarz]

Since you should always make at least two copies of everything before dumping the original, why not keep one set as an "As recorded" archive and organize the second set as you feel works best for workflow purposes?

This way you won't mix up which data set you are manipulating - and if you make a mistake, you have an immediate recovery solution easily accessible.

There is a mantra that you will learn to love when it comes to files / data… "If it does not exist in two places, it doesn't exist at all".

(In the long run, that means duplicate data in different geographic locations)