In my continuing effort to find a solid, reliable and affordable solution for long term archival of our editing projects, I have spent the last 12 months testing and creating a workflow for yet another product solution. Unlike when I reviewed the Cache~a a few years back (the positive review since removed from the site), I decided to spend a lot more time really running it through the paces. I learned my lesson the hard way with the Prime Cache and made changes to my review process.

The product that I’m reviewing this time is the “Edit Bay Production Desktop” software and hardware package from the Tolis Group. It has turned out to be quite the winner, and I’m excited to share our experience with it. While they do offer several different solutions of hardware/software or software only solutions (you provide the hardware), I’m going to focus on this one all in one package. It’s my feeling that this is the best fit for the small to medium sized post house with 1-5 workstations. To see some of their offerings, check out their website.

http://www.tolisgroup.com

What’s Included – Installation

What I liked about the “Edit Bay Production Desktop” package right from the onset was that it was a complete solution for your Mac. You provide a G5 tower, Xserve or MacPro computer with a open PCIe slot (must be a 8x slot), and they provide you with everything else.

In your open PCIe slot you will install a SAS host bus adaptor. The card they provide is the ATTO ExpressSAS H680, and it was as easy to install as a video card. It’s as simple as removing the side panel of your tower and adding the card to your open slot.

(Above is the Expansion Slot Utility that is on most, but not all Power Macs. Because the system we have the card installed on (a quad G5) does not support this utility, I took this snap from a different computer in the office just to show the utility. So don’t be surprised that in this shot the ATTO card is not listed. This utility allows you to configure the speed of your slots by dividing up the bandwidth in whichever way best suits your setup)

Once booted up, you install a driver for the ATTO card from the included CD, reboot again and the card is ready for use.

After that, turn the machine off and attach the LTO drive. Depending on the package that you choose, you will receive either a LTO-4 or LTO-5 drive. Both are HP drives in a external case. We have the LTO-5 drive.

With the LTO drive attached and the machine booted up, install the BRU Producer Edition software (from here on referred to as BRU PE) . This is really the heart of the product and is written for OSX specifically. Installation is as easy as mounting the included CD ROM or downloaded .dmg disk image and running the installer. Now you’re ready to start.

Hardware Details

As mentioned, the LTO drive is a Hewlett Packard unit inside of a external case, and has a single SAS connector. The case is nothing special, and if anything is a bit on the ugly side. In this case, form did not follow function, it just never showed up to the party. It’s not a big deal given that the unit will be located out of sight in most instances, but it’s still worth noting.

But there is one thing I really dislike about the case. It is noisy. I don’t have any sound measuring equipment, but being the nerd that I am I can tell you this unit is LOUD when it’s on. Too loud if you ask me. And I’m not talking about when the tape is shuttling all over the place (it’s even louder then), I’m saying just when you flip on the power button. I don’t think any attempt was made what so ever to make this thing quite, and it is far too loud to have in a edit suite while you’re working. Even if you’re not doing sound editing, it will drive you insane after awhile. We DO have it in a edit suite, but only run the backups after hours because of the noise it creates. When I return in the morning and open the edit suite door, it sounds like I’m entering a machine room that’s full of all kinds of hardware fans.

I asked Tollis about this, and they said they didn’t consider this to be a noisy unit. I disagree, especially when you’re selling it as a “Edit Bay” product. There’s nothing physically wrong with the unit, it’s not as if a fan is broken, so it’s just the way it was designed. We plan to relocate ours into a machine room soon with all of the other noisy gear.

Our Setup

It’s important to note that all of our backups are done over gigabit ethernet. What that means is that we can keep the LTO-5 software and hardware on a central machine, but still access every machine in the office to do backups. In our case, we only have 2 places that the editing projects and media are stored, but neither of those are on the local machine running BRU PE.

As shown in the diagram, we have multiple machines accessing 2 main media drives, and a G5 that we use exclusively for BRU PE.

Software Overview

Having used a few different backup programs over the years, I can tell you that backup software (regardless of backup media type) falls into two categories. There is the really full featured software that was well thought out and does virtually everything you need, but is somewhat complicated to learn and use. And in the other camp you have the software that’s very easy and intuitive to use, but falls short of doing anything beyond the most basic tasks and usually lacks some critical features. I think this is the first time I’ve used a piece of backup software that straddle both camps nicely.

If there’s one thing that hits you when you first start using BRU PE, it’s that it’s so simple it’s almost disturbingly easy to use. I kept thinking I must be missing something, or maybe I was doing something wrong and just didn’t know it yet. But that was not the case.

Here are the general steps to creating a backup in its most basic form.

1. Launch the program.
2. Drag and drop full volumes, folders or individual files from direct attached or network mounted machines into the main window
3. Click on the “Create Archive” button.
4. Go have lunch and see a movie.

Seriously, it’s THAT EASY. That’s not to say that there are not more options that you could choose, but you don’t have to if you don’t want to. This in itself is proof that just as their promotional information points out, you can train the most junior level of your staff to do this in just a few seconds. Even after using the Cache~a product (the Prime Cache) for nearly 2 years, I never felt like I had a good handle on how it worked or even what a good workflow was. Who knew that well thought out, well designed and properly executed software could be both powerful and easy to use!?

If you do nothing more than click on the “create archive” button, here is what will happen.

First, the software will scan the files that you dragged to the window and display a estimated size of the final archive. This is handy to make sure your final archive is not larger than the media you are putting it on (although you can span tapes, so that in itself is not a big deal).

If you do nothing, this dialog will go away after 30 seconds and it will start the archiving process. Obviously, how long it takes has everything to do with the amount of data you’re backing up, but generally speaking it’s very fast. There is a very nice, good looking progress window that provides all kind of useful information.

Once the archive has been created, the software will then automatically verify the archive. This is the process of comparing the data on the hard drive to the data on the tape and making sure everything matches perfectly. What’s interesting is that this is done a a 2k level, checking and comparing at 2k intervals. While this adds a bit more to the final archive size, what you get in trade is a much more robust ability to catch errors during the backup and recover from them later should you have any on the tape.

After the verify is done, a summary is displayed with several reporting options.

In addition to doing full backups, BRU PE also handles both differential and incremental backups, giving you flexibility on how you want to handle your archives. This comes in most handy if you’re doing regular scheduled backups of full systems and don’t want to backup everything all the time.

That’s the very simple overview of how it works. In a later section I’ll go into more detail of how we use the unit and what our post-production work flow is.

TAR vs BRU Format

It’s probably a good idea to compare the BRU archive format to what many would consider the long standard of tape backup, TAR.

The majority of tape backup systems are based on the long standing TAR format. TAR has been around for many years and is a cross platform standard for tape backups. I’m generally in favor of open standards vs closed standards (but don’t try to take any of my iOS devices from me!). There is comfort in knowing a technology does not reside with a single company. But that’s not the whole picture to consider, or even the most important when it comes to creating backups.

As The Tolis Group tells the story, the BRU format was created because of the shortcomings of the very old unix based TAR format (TApe Archive). While the TAR format has been around for many years and is widely used and accepted, that doesn’t come without flaws. Just a few of the shortcomings include lack of Checksum-based Verification, Recognition of Media Errors During Backup and the ability to recover from corrupted media. The BRU format was designed to fill in the gaps of TAR and to provide new modern features that make backups more robust and reliable.

While this review is of the Mac version of BRU PE, the fact is that if you create a backup tape on a Mac system, you can later restore it on any other supported system, using any other version of the BRU software. For example, you can take your OSX created archive and with the proper software and the catalog file, restore it using BRU Server for Windows or BRU Workstation on Oracle/Sun Solaris.

One thing that BRU handles very well, is metadata on your files. Unlike so many other backup systems we’ve tried (especially the Cache~a device) all of the important metadata is included as part of your backup and restore process. For example, file attributes such as ownership, permissions, creation and modification dates are all retained through the backup and restore process. Even hard and symbolic links are reproduced with all of their attributes intact.

If you’re interested in knowing more, BRU has a great white paper on their website that explains the significant differences.

Our Workflow

One of the most important parts of any backup plan is having a good workflow. You need a way to communicate when a project is done, when it’s prepped and ready to be archived, when the archive is complete and verified and when it’s OK to delete the media and free up drive space. It’s also a good idea to keep track of what’s on each tape as well with a cataloging system. After many revisions and improvements to our workflow, we finally have what I would consider a solid plan in place. That’s what I will describe here. While the details I describe here are very specific to our setup, you should easily be able to adapt it to your operation, even if you’re not using BRU or a LTO backup system.

Finder Organization

A good foundation starts in the finder. Our projects are either ACTIVE projects, or COMPLETED projects. By default, if a project is not complete it keeps the ACTIVE project status until it is complete. This can be anywhere from a few months to over a year in some cases (although that’s rare).

At Edit Creations we have 3 main edit suites, and they share two different Fibre RAID systems. We have what I have always called a semi-poor mans shared drive system. The two MacPros we have are attached directly to their own dedicated RAID systems over 4-gig fiber. But those dedicated drives are shared over Gigabit Ethernet with each other, and a MacBook Pro laptop edit system. Overall, it works out great. It allows us to open and edit with any project, in any of the 3 rooms, and have access to everything – even the render files. The MacBook Pro has no projects stored locally, and instead uses both of the RAID drives from the two MacPro Systems. This works out great because we can use a small SSD drive in the Laptop to speed it up while using the RAID drives for all of the heavy storage.

On each of the RAID drives, we have a series of folders.

Active projects are stored in a single folder, and are organized by job number. We follow a rigid folder structure that’s the same starting point for every job.

If a project is complete, it’s moved to the “Project Archive” on the same RAID drive that it’s currently located. There are 3 different phases of a project that is considered complete.

1) Needs Media Managing

2) Ready to Archive

3) Ready to Delete

Here’s how each of those stages are handled.

Needs Media Managing

About once a month I look over all of the projects listed in the “Active Projects” folder, and I have each editor do the same thing. While multiple editors may work on the same project, there’s almost always one person that’s considered the lead editor on a job and is ultimately responsible for the job.

As the projects are reviewed, projects that are considered complete are highlighted in the finder using the YELLOW label. Once done reviewing the active projects folder, all of the projects marked in YELLOW are moved to the stage 1 folder of the project archive folder – Needs Media Managing.

Each of the projects located in this folder now need the final sequences in the edit folder media managed so that all of the media used in the final edited sequences is included inside of the project folder. The main goal at this point is to create an archived project that can be opened at a later date and edited if needed. All of this media needs to be consolidated into the project folder, not the capture scratch folder.

Again, since we use a template driven work flow, there is always a bin in every FCP project called “Edit”. During the process of archiving, everything inside of the edit bin is media managed and consolidated into the project folder, so that everything needed to open that job is in a single location.

In the example shown here, there were several sequences for this single project (I shutter to think how I would have to handle this in FCPx). There were many versions of this final video for different regions, and in different languages. I want to have each and every final sequence in a form that allows me to easily make revisions should I need to in the future.

With the “Edit” bin selected, I select Media Manager and am presented with a window of options that help me decide how I want to handle the media for these sequences. Because I don’t want to save absolutely everything, I need to optimize the settings here.

I choose to COPY the media from these sequences, but also choose to discard any media that was not used in the final sequences. This alone saves a ton of space on most projects. While you can add handles that will give you some wiggle room on each shot, I almost always choose not to do this. I rarely need it, and over time it’s just wasted space on the backup tape unless you really need it.

The location of the archived media is set to the “Project Archive” folder inside of the current project folder, and the new FCP project file that it creates is saved in the FCP Project folder with the exact same name, but with “PA” appended to the end (we always use “PA” to represent Project Archive”.

Once this process is complete, the folder is then turned orange in the finder and moved into the second folder labeled “Ready to Archive”.

Ready to Archive

Once enough projects are moved to the “Ready To Archive” folder, they are organized into subfolders. Each of the subfolders is named with the name of the LTO tape it will be going on, and projects are added and subtracted until the folder size is around 1.2 TB. This is the approximate size that we know will fill a LTO-5 tape, but still leave a bit or breathing space. While we could avoid the subfolder process and do all of the organization inside of the BRU PE software, we have found over time that it’s just more flexible to work it all out in advance, and then just copy that single “pre weighed” folder to the LTO tape.

With the folder organized and the proper size, we’re ready to archive it.

Using BRU

Creating an archive is so simple, you have to wonder how other companies like Cache~a have missed the mark by so much. At its most basic, it’s a drag and drop function. At its most complex, you have some additional options and navigation, but it’s still stupid simple. Let’s take a look at the easy option first – what BRU calls QuickArchive View.

QuickArchive View

When you first launch BRU PE you are asked for an administrator password for that machine. This is not for security purposes or access control, but instead to allow BRU PE to properly restore files with the correct permissions/metadata, and to the location of your choosing. As the notice on the screen says, you can still operate the software without it, but you may have read/write issues later.

Once open, you’re presented with a very simple mac like interface. In fact, the only way to get files loaded into the window is by doing a drag and drop. As mentioned earlier, we pre-prep our folders with the jobs we need to archive, and make sure that folder will fit onto the tape that we have. This is especially helpful if we’re trying to top off a tape.

Please note that this review was written on and off over several months, so as a result some of the continuing action screen shots will not match up. For example, the folder we prepared was for Archive 85, but the one I’m showing in this example is Archive 88.

As you can see, there are only a few checkboxes, and most are self explanatory. At this point it’s as simple as dragging our folder onto the file window and releasing the mouse.

While it has defaulted to “Append Archive”, which will continue to add to a previous archive tape that still has room on it, in this case I’m going to be using a new tape, so it will actually end up being a overwrite.

If you had the “provide job metadata information” box checked, this screen will appear allowing you to add other details about the archive. In general, we don’t actually use this feature since we have a very rich index of everything we archive though CDFinder (covered shortly).

One nice feature that I like is the preview mode. Before it starts writing to a tape, it gives you an estimate as to how much space you will need on the tape. This will help you catch problems prior to spending hours of backup time, only to find out you were 500 megs short of space on the tape. If you don’t respond to the estimate, it will continue with the archive after 30 seconds automatically.

Now that the archive is running, you’re presented with a very satisfying information screen that shows the progress, what file it’s currently working on and a time estimate. I say satisfying because watching how fast some of the files are getting backed up gives me a nice warm feeling inside.

Once the operation is complete, you’re presented with the final screen that gives you a few different options. This is one of the best features of the software.

First, you can create what BRU PE calls a “BRUsetta Stone CD”, that contains the tape catalog, metadata and a copy of the BRU PE software. This is great if you need to restore that tape using another machine, because it includes everything you will need to get the job done.

The second option is to export the catalog file for backup, or to move the tape to another system for restore (assuming that other system already has the software installed).

The third option (the one that we use) is to print the details of the job, including every file that was backed up, error messages (if any) and backup and verification information. We don’t print it out to paper, we just print to a PDF and keep it stored on the server for reference should we ever need it. A typical backup job for us creates a report that’s often over 100 pages long, so if you really do send it to a printer, make sure to have a few extra reams of paper standing by.

The one thing that we always verify in the report is that there were no errors during backup or verification. As long as both of those numbers are “0”, the backup is considered solid and we pop the tape and add it to the shelf.

We also setup the BRU PE software to send a email to all the editors on staff when it’s complete, because that too includes a more boiled down summary of the job, and if it was completed successfully.

Advanced View

For most people, the QuickArchive View is going to get the job done. What I really like about it is that it’s hard to get confused over something so simple. But if you are feeling like you don’t want the dumbed down interface, take a look at the advanced view. At anytime, you can switch between them just by clicking the icon in the upper right corner.

In the advanced view, the 2 main options that are added are the ability to navigate to specific areas using the shortcut icons, and the ability to schedule regular backups using the scheduling function. You can drag and drop files in this mode, but you can also navigate around the hard drive and add files and folders by double clicking on them. This brings me to one of my complaints about the software.

When you’re navigating around the file system on OSX, in the finder or in most programs, double clicking on a folder is how you open it to expose its contents. Not so when using BRU. To get the same result inside of BRU PE you’re forced to click on the little disclosure triangle for the directory, which will open it up to expose the contents (which also works in the finder). However, if you by instinct double click on a folder to open it, it will not actually open it but instead add it to the list of items to be archived. This is extremely counter intuitive, and hard to overcome even once you know it because it’s so second nature to use this action when opening folders. It certainly flies in the face of the Apple Interface Guidelines. If you’re not careful, you can easily end up adding additional files and directories that you had no intention of backing up. This really surprises me given how mac-like the software is otherwise. This is probably one of the reasons that I prefer the QuickArchive View.

Operation otherwise is the same. You can get into saving job definitions, which is like a backup set but I’m not going to cover that since it’s not applicable to the type of archives we’re talking about here.

Tape Doubler

While this review covers the single drive setup that’s best for the edit bay, it’s worth noting that if you had 2 drives attached, BRU PE has a nice feature called “Doubler Mode”. This allows you to backup the same data to two different tapes, without having to run the same archive process twice. If you’re in the habit of making one copy for on-site storage, and one for off-site storage, this could be a big time saver. We only have a single drive, so we were not able to test this feature ourselves.

Archive Library

There’s no point of going through all this work if you can’t find what you need later. We have a pretty simple library system that was easy to put into place. While BRU PE does have its own internal library system (covered later), we find our solution to be better for our workflow.

Once we have a 1-1 duplicate of a archive folder to LTO tape, and we have verified that the contents of both are the same (using the verify function as part of the BRU PE software), we scan and catalog the folder that was the source for that particular tape. By doing so, we have a complete listing of what is on the tape that we can search anytime from any computer in the office, while the tapes are sitting on the shelf. The program we use to do this is called “CD Finder” from West-Forest-Systems.

CDFinder

Don’t let the name throw you. CDFinder is a cataloging/indexing program that works with everything from removable media to full hard drives. I’m actually surprised that they have not rebranded the program yet given how dated the software sounds just based on the name itself. I would guess they even miss out on sales because people see the “CD” and think “I don’t even use CD’s”.

But unlike many programs I’ve tried in the past, CDFinder does the job perfectly, is a light-weight program that launches fast and indexes almost as fast, and finding that needle in the haystack is as simple is typing in a search term and hitting return. I also appreciate that the programmer (Norbert M. Doerner) keeps the program up to date and is always adding new useful features. Only a few weeks after Lion was released they released a Lion version of their program. When a big OS update like Lion comes out, you really find out which developers are dedicated to their programs and which are not.

I’m not going to do a full review of the CDFinder program, you can do that yourself or watch some of their video tutorials on-line. What I will do is give you the basics of how we use it.

Because over time we’ve had different series of archives (hard drives, then LTO, and some client specific) we created a few folders inside of CDFinder to organize our catalog files.

Inside of each of those folders is a list of the different media that was cataloged, and what is on each of them.

Creating new catalog is as easy is clicking on the “new” button, and selecting the folder, removable media or hard drive you want a catalog of, and hitting OK. The drive is scanned and a new catalog file is added to the library.

If you really want to get crazy, you can even have CDFinder create thumbnails of images as part of the catalog so when you’re browsing later you can get a sense of the images you’re looking at. Here’s a look at just some of the cataloging options you’re given in CDFinder.

Finding what you want is just as easy. Open the find window, choose the criteria you would like to search by, and hit find. A list of results will appear, and clicking on any of those results in the window with all the info that you need to reload that file or directory.

If I have one gripe about the CDFinder program, it’s that they require that you purchase a “business license” to store the catalog file on a network share. It’s like Microsoft saying you can’t save a word document on your NAS drive because you didn’t buy a business license. I think where I choose to save my file is up to me, and I should’t have to pay extra to add back in a feature that every other program on the planet already includes. You may be wondering why this matters. It matters because if you want to use multiple computers to access the data that you’ve cataloged, you need to put the catalog file in a central location, and then point them all to it. But on the “Private” license (for $39) you are required to save the catalog file locally on the computer the software is installed on. That’s fine if you have one computer, but we can’t get by with just that. So instead, you have to pay $149 for the 2-user business license. That’s right, for more than $100 extra, you get the privilege to save your file on the network, and share it with ONE other user. There are no other additional features in the business licensed program. This is just bad business in my opinion, and does not reflect well on the company.

My gripe aside, I like the program, think that it’s well written and it’s very actively maintained. I’ll step down from my soap box now.

Ready To Delete

Now that everything is on the LTO tapes, cataloged and we’re confident that there are no errors, it’s time to move the projects to the 3^rd and final finder folder, “Ready To Delete”.

This is one of the most important steps in our workflow, and I prefer to save this final step for myself and only myself. The reason being, when it comes to deleting projects from the edit systems – I want to be sure if a mistake is made, it’s on me. I can handle being pissed at myself and I can’t be fired. It also serves as a nice check/balance. I’m able to verify that all of the proper steps were followed before this undoable step.

This is where having such a unique job numbering system comes in extremely handy, and helps keep you from deleting files that you may not want to delete. The goal at this stage is not only to remove the project files that we just backed up to the LTO tape, but to remove ALL files associated with this project, and only this project. That includes the capture scratch and all audio and video render files. And they need to be removed from both RAID drives, since it’s not unusual for projects to be edited in multiple rooms. The way we handle this is with a program called Path Finder. It’s a very full featured Finder replacement, but I only use it for this one purpose – its ability to search multiple local and remote locations at the same time and return all files in a single window.

Path Finder

Path Finder allows you to search your entire computer or specific folders just like the Finder, but unlike version 10.5 or later of the Finder (including Lion) you can not set multiple custom locations. In our case, we limit the search to just the two RAID drives. By doing this, any search that we do on the job number will find every file and folder associated with that job, and nothing more.

And instead of relying on the index file of Spotlight, we have it do a raw search of the drive, ignoring any spotlight information. When searching on remote drives, Spotlight can be hit or miss in our experience and tends to be slower.

Now that we have our search locations setup properly, we’re ready to search and destroy (delete) our projects and all associated media. With the find window open, fill in the full job number. Actually, just to make sure to avoid any errors, I keep two windows open. One with the “Ready to Delete” folder and the other is the find window and results. With both open, I can copy and paste the job number into the name field. I also make sure “Starts With” is selected, because anything I need to delete should start with the job number. This prevents any other documents that might reference this number from being removed.

Click search and almost instantly the lower part of the search window is populated with all of the files and locations that you need to remove. As a habit, I always review the find results and make sure nothing looks unusual. Again, I’m just making sure everything in the window is in fact part of the job that I’m getting ready to remove. Once satisfied, I do a “select all” inside the results portion of the find window and hit Command-Delete to remove all of the files. Local files are moved to the trash can, but remote volume files are deleted immediately – so be careful. So with one stroke of the keyboard, all of your files, from all locations local or otherwise, are removed.

Now I just move down the list of jobs in the “ready to delete” folder and repeat the same steps for each of the job numbers. After that, empty the trash on the local computer and do the happy dance. You’re done and have new free space on your drives.

Restoring Data

While backing up data is very solid using BRU PE, restoring is a bit less intuitive. It’s fine, and it gets the job done, it’s just not quite as smooth.

When you click on the Restore icon in the toolbar, you’re presented with a list of catalog files for each tape that you’ve ever backed up on that particular machine. If there was more than one backup session to on a tape, there will be a number added to the icon as some of the ones here have.

If you select a catalog file, the contents of that will be shown on the right pane. However, this is again one of those minor annoyances. By default it will just show you the root level, and then you will need to click on each and every disclosure triangle just to get to the folder with the data you backed up. And sometimes clicking on the disclosure triangle seems to be sluggish. You may find yourself clicking more than once to get it to open. But OK fine, it does work eventually.

But when you’re ready to find those files, what you’ll really be doing is a search of the catalog. You can click on a single catalog (if you know what tape the file is on), or you can search the entire library all at once.

In this example, I’m choosing to search for just a single job, and I know what the job number is. But what I find amazing in this day and age of things being infinitely searchable, is that you can only search on a single criteria. Normally if I was doing a search like this, I would choose to search using the job number, but then also add another criteria stating that I only want results returned that are folders with that name (because ultimately what I’m looking for is the project folder with that number). This is a big miss with the BRU PE software.

When we use CD-Finder to search for files we need to restore, it can search every archive we’ve ever created (totaling over 100 when you count the HD archives we made in the past and client specific backups) and it can do it in a matter of seconds. Most searches, even complex ones only take about 2-5 seconds. But just performing the simple search I’m showing you here on less than 20 archives took over 3 minutes. And because I couldn’t confine the results to only folders, the results I was returned still left me too much to have to sift through.

This just makes another case for using CDFinder to keep catalogs of all of your archives. Our process is to do a search inside of CD-Finder, find out what tape it’s on, and then just go directly to that tape in BRU PE, find the files or directory and restore them. The whole process is so much faster, not to mention you can do many complex searches with CD-Finder in the time it takes to do just one with BRU.

This is what the search window and restore results (for the same job) look like using CD-Finder.

And this is the results that were returned. Infinitely more usable and user friendly.

But let’s continue down the line of just using the BRU software and how you would restore your files.

Once you have your search results and you’ve parsed out what it is you actually want to restore, you click the check boxes by the files or directories that you want, or you can choose to check all of them using the “add all” check box. You then click on the “Add Checked” button and close the window. You will now be returned to the main window with your selected items added to the window.

The last option to decide on before you start the restore is where these files are going. By default files are restored to their original location from where they were backed up. I guess this can be a good thing for some workflows, but for us this would just cause issues. It means that files would be returned to the “ready to delete” folder, which could cause some confusion. To avoid this problem, check the box that allows you to “Restore to an Alternate location”, and then navigate to any local or network mounted volume.

Now with everything ready to go, insert the tape you are pulling the files off of and click on the restore button. If you have the wrong tape in or the drive is empty, you will be prompted for the correct tape to insert.

When you consider how much data a LTO-5 tape can hold, it’s pretty amazing how fast it can find the files it needs are restores them. Like I mentioned, everything we do is over gigabit ethernet and the speed is still lightning fast.

Once your restore is complete a dialog box will appear letting you know that all was restored well. If what you’ve chosen to restore is on more than one tape, you will be prompted each time a new tape is needed. This is where a library system that can automatically load tapes comes in handy.

Library/Catalog Backup

One problem we did run into during our test period is that at one point we launched the BRU PE program and the library of tapes that we had created (usually listed on the restore screen) were gone. While in practice we don’t use those files to locate files that we’re looking for (as previously mentioned, we use CDFinder and a external catalog file), the BRU PE software does need these files to understand what tapes have been created and what is on each tape. It’s what enables you to quickly restore your files from such a massive tape.

With the help of tech support we were able to restore/rebuild the tapes that we needed by re-inserting each tape and having the catalog files rebuilt, but from that point on we decided that we should have a regular backup of that information. Even on the Tolis website they recommend that you do this.

All of the important files that you need to backup are located at the following location.

/private/var/lib/bru

You may be looking at that “location” and be wondering how the heck you get to it. After all, to most people (other than developers) this is not a familiar location, not to mention it’s hidden from view in the finder. The best way to get to this location is to use the “Go to Folder” command in the finder. While in the finder, click on the drop down menu under “Go” and then select the “Go To Folder” option.

In the next dial box that opens, type in the string outlined above and click GO.

The next finder window that opens will be the folder that you need to keep a backup copy of.

To make sure this always happens on it’s own, we use the program Déjà Vu that keeps this folder synced to our NAS on a daily basis. I would strongly recommend that you implement something alone the same lines to save you possible frustration later.

User Manual

Being a bit of a manual geek, I can tell you that the BRU PE user manual is one of the better manuals I’ve read. It’s written in a way that’s easy to understand and gets right to the point. It covers every aspect of the software in much more detail than I’m doing here and even makes some recommendations on the topic of workflow. I also enjoyed the landscape format, which made it comfortable to read on my iPad.

While the manual is 186 pages long, probably around a third of it is terminal commands. If you’re really feeling like the BRU PE GUI is just too easy to use, launch the Terminal app and try your hand at typing it all in by hand. Personally, I have zero interest in this, but there must be enough people out there to justify the detail they put into the manual in covering this topic.

Future Proof Archives?

So now you have a solid backup of your projects, and maybe you even made a second copy to keep off site at home or in a safe deposit box. But what if the worst happens and the Tolis Group suddenly goes out of business or stops selling/supporting the product? After all, because they’re using their own proprietary archive format you actually do need BRU in order to recover your tape contents.

Well not to fear. There are two very good pieces of insurance that will let you sleep better at night.

First (as discussed earlier), every time that you create a new archive tape, at the end you are presented with a dialog that lets you create a CD or DVD that includes the catalog file for that tape (basically a list of it’s contents and location on the tape), all metadata, and a copy of the BRU PE Software that you just used to create the tape. They disk also includes installation and restore instructions. So aside from the hardware needed to do a restore, you have everything that you need between the LTO tape and the CD/DVD that you create. They call this disk a BRUsetta Stone CD.

But if the worst happens and the Tollis group goes out of business, they are committed to put the most recent copy of the BRU software in Escrow with the NARAS, and if you’re a member of NARAS you can retrieve a copy if you need it. So it’s not as if you’re going to no longer have access to your data.

Here is my personal take. The Tolis Group has been around since 1985 and has a great history of making great products. I see no reason to worry about them going out of business anytime soon, and even if they did I am left with the tools that I need (through the BRUsetta Stone CD) to restore any tapes I have made over the years. True, I would probably want to start looking for something new to create new archives, but I would not be locked out of my old archives.

The fact is that technology changes so fast that my guess is 5-10 years from now I may not even be using LTO in favor of some newer and greater technology. When that comes along, I’ll move forward as well. And over time, the archives I’m making will have less and less value anyway. While the tapes are rated to last for 30 years, I would be happy if they lasted for half that. No client has ever come back to me for something older than 5-6 years, and that is very rare. My point is, I don’t need to keep these backups until the end of time. And if 30 years from now I had better not be still browsing my LTO-5 tapes and restoring jobs for clients. If I am, my life has taken a very bad turn somewhere along the line.

Go Beyound with BRU Server

While the focus of this review has been on backing up your edit projects, if you’re looking for something more comprehensive that will backup multiple computers in your office, BRU Server might be something worth looking at. It adds the ability to do client to server automated backups over your network so that entire machines are regularly backed up. The price point is obviously much higher and instead of a single tape drive you would usually use a library system that would hold 12-24 tapes.

And if you REALLY have money to burn, go for their Backup Appliance called bruAPP. This is a standalone device that includes both the BRU Server technology and OS, combined with a tape library system. It’s everything in a single box, and can be configured to hold upwards of 144 TB of storage. It also includes internal disk storage that allows you to “stage” your files for backup so that your local network is not impacted during large backups. If I had the money I would LOVE to have this as part of my office backup strategy.

LTFS

I’ve talked a lot about the BRU format as well as TAR, and some may be wondering about the newer format called LTFS (Linear Tape File System), which has been brought to light by IBM to address some of the shortcomings of the TAR format. This format promises the use of LTO tapes directly on the desktop, allowing you to mount them to your desktop and use them more like you would use a mounted hard drive. One of the significant advantages of this format is that the catalog is included on the tape, so in theory if you have the proper software installed you could mount a tape on any machine just by popping it into the drive.

On the surface this sounds pretty awesome. We all know how to interact with hard drives and to see a tape mounted on the desktop that you can just drag and drop files to/from sounds like the holy grail. That is, until you get into the details of it. I’ve looked into it and talked to a few engineers about their opinions and here’s the short answer of what you need to know.

The LTFS file system has issues with slow access to files, no knowledge of an unmounted tape, single user access and limited file type compatibility. In addition, cross platform file exchanges are problematic because different software and drivers need to be written specifically for each platform, and may not be able to read tapes or files created on other systems. In short, in the current incarnation of the format it falls short of being a solid backup format and almost borders on being expermintal. While it’s possible that down the road this will change that remains to be seen. And after all, we’re talking about what is possible right now, not in the future.

So while I was initially very excited about what the LTFS file format might provide, as usual the sales pitch is better than the actual facts behind it. At the time of this writing the BRU folks have no plans of supporting the format as it now stands, and I think that’s a good thing. Just adopting a new format because it’s the latest and “greatest” thing is not always the best thing. I think it says a lot about their engineering team that they have investigated it and decided it was not up to par for their products.

If you would like to read more about the format yourself, you can find a pretty detailed entry on Wikipedia here.

Cost of Ownership

While the software can be purchased as a standalone product for $499, in most cases you’re going to want to buy the hardware bundle unless you already own a tape drive that you want to use. As part of the whole package, the software is cheaper with the bundled price. With all of their bundles you get a license for the BRU PE software and 1 year of support. Support includes help using the software, but also includes any upgrades to the software beyond bug fixes that are released during your 1 year period.

If you let the 1 year support contract lapse, you can still use the software but will not be eligible for upgrades to the software. I’m not sure that’s a big deal, because generally speaking if it’s working, it’s working. It does everything I need it to, so I’m not sure what features might be added that had me wanting to upgrade.

If you do decide to continue your support contract, it will cost you $199 per year and you would get all major updates (say version 2 to version 3) included in that price. If you don’t have it, and the same software is released you can still purchase the software for $249.

Overhead or Money Maker?

One of the big misses that many editors make in my opinion is passing on their ability to turn this process into a service that they sell to their clients. The big complaint that I hear is that buying software and hardware like this can be expensive, and it really can. But not prohibitively so. The fact is, people do need archives of their projects and in many cases they are willing to pay you to take care of it for them, and to keep track of everything. On top of backing up editing projects, another big room for growth has been backup camera originals from tapeless media, which is all we shoot anymore.

I can only speak from our own experience and tell that in far less than a year we were turning a profit on doing backups over what we had paid on both the hardware/software and the tapes we purchased to do the backups. We charge a flat fee per project, and in most cases can fit more than a single project on a tape. So a single 1.5 TB LTO-5 tape can generate anywhere between $500 and $1,500 in revenue depending on the size of the projects. It’s pretty easy to do the math and see how this is not much of a risk in the long run. The fact is, you are offering a very valuable and necessary service.

Here’s how we approached it. I ask every client this question. “As part of doing this project, would you like me to back it up to a long term storage tape for future access, or do you want me to just delete everything when I’m done?” What would you say to that question?

While we charge a flat fee for creating an archive of each project, we don’t charge anything for restoring files. So the client can recall those files as much as needed and know that they will not be billed for it.

It’s seriously something to consider when you’re looking at creating your archiving system, your workflow and a library system. While it might be a lot to get pulled together in the beginning, it’s well worth it in the long run on many fronts.

The SuiteTake

While not without a few minor annoyances, I’m very pleased with the BRU software and hardware bundle. For the first time in a very long time I feel like I have a very solid and robust workflow and backup system. That’s a big deal, because if you don’t have something you have faith in, it can add a lot of stress to your life (at least it has for me in the past).

We have now used this solution for over a year and feel very comfortable saying it’s a nice solid and affordable package, even for a small boutique post house like Edit Creations. I look forward to your comments and your own shared experiences.

It is with great excitement that I am finally able to make an announcement that has been eating at me for nearly a year now. In June of 2009 when the iPhone 3GS was released I had a flash of what the future could hold for editing, and it’s that moment of inspiration that gave birth to the product I’m announcing today.

Our new groundbreaking product, Final Cut Pro Mobile, is now available on the iPhone 3GS. It will also be available on the iPad later this year. You heard me right – the full suite of FCPS apps have been ported to the iPhone 3GS, and in some cases, we’ve been able to add additional features not found in the current offerings from Apple.

Much of our inspiration at SuiteTake.com to create this mobile suite was inspired by the growing interest in editing projects outside of the office. While the edit suite has been the traditional place to get your project done, technology no longer limits us to just a single location. And it was with that vision in mind that we marched forward with the project. Here is a quick overview of what the new suite includes.

Final Cut Pro M

Starting with the current version of Final Cut Pro 7 from 2009, we included all of the same new features as well as the under the hood improvements from Apple. But we’ve also added some features that are only possible on the iPhone.

For example, with a single swipe of your finger – you can save your project, duplicate it, or permanently delete it – all with the same gesture. Swiping at different speeds determines which of the functions is selected. Now that’s efficient!

Need a quick rough cut of the footage you’ve imported? Just shake your phone up and down 3 times and the built-in accelerometer will create a rough cut using the current ins and outs of each clip. The phone will use our patented Content Detection™ algorithm to analyze dialog, body language and facial expressions. It will then systematically assemble the clips in the most pleasing and logical way.

Motion M

Complete with Open GL acceleration, 3D shadows and real-time playback, you can create graphics at uncompressed 4K or HD resolution while browsing the iTunes store, surfing the web or taking a call from your client. And all of this while you’re outside of the standard ball-and-chain edit suite. Be inspired – be Mobile!

While the standard motion templates that you’re used to are included, we’ve also added the ability to buy templates through the App Store, right inside of Motion M. Using your iTunes account and 3G networking you can download the latest templates where you want, when you want.

Soundtrack Pro M

Using your iPhone earbuds you can mix your latest soundtrack while listening to your favorite iPod playlist, checking your messages with  Google Voice and browsing SFX from the SoundTrack library.  All while walking through the busy city traffic to catch your bus to the beach.

But it’s not just about multi-tasking. SoundTrack Pro M can mix up to 256 tracks of audio in real time, has new MIDI functions available through the dock connector and now includes a cool iTunes-like screen saver to help you  see your audio as you mix. This is part of our new SeeHearMix™ technology.

Color M

Who says you need a $10K monitor to color grade your latest film? Don’t let the monitor industry make a fool out of you any longer! Using the precision color LCD touch screen on the iPhone you can grade like a pro using just your fingertips.

What’s that? You don’t have time to do the grading yourself? Again we tied into the Apple App Store and you can now purchase and download preset looks based on the type of project you’re grading. Some of the categories include Corporate Training Video, Broadcast Reality Show, Broadcast Sitcom, Over Produced Documentary, Low Budget Film, B-Movie, Direct to DVD, Flip Cam to Film Look and Barely Good Enough For YouTube. Each preset will optimize the look and feel of your video based on your target audience.

DVD Studio Pro M

Apple may not have updated DVD Studio Pro, but we sure did.

Need a DVD and need it while on the go? No problem! Plug in your favorite DVD burner and create a Standard Def or Blu-ray DVD on the spot right from your iPhone using our patented USB-BlazeBurn™ technology.

Don’t have a DVD burner? That’s OK too. Master directly to our new SuiteTake.com Print-On-Demand DVD service. Most DVDs will upload over 3G in just 2-3 weeks, and you’ll receive your DVD copies within one calendar year. Let’s face it, you didn’t really need it that fast anyway.

iChat Theater M

Using the iPhone 3GS camera,  you can now chat with your client live while watching your latest cut. You can even conference in up to three other members of the “creative team” to watch and comment on the playback of your sequence while referencing a live timecode window. Getting unwanted needless feedback has never been so easy.

And Finally, Compressor M

Compressor is more then a compression engine – it’s a publishing factory. Set up automated processes that will convert your final video to the proper format and upload it to iTunes, YouTube, Vimeo, FaceBook or just a standard FTP site.

As an exclusive to the Mobile FCP Suite, you can even export directly to another iPhone no matter where they are in the world. And all of this over 3G. Take that AT&T!

Need more speed while compressing? Using iPhone QMaster integration you can cluster up to 50 iPhone 3GSs together to cut compression times by up to 8.9%. (Estimated, actual savings can vary. In some cases render times can actually increase up to 75% due to some unknown reason that we’re still baffled by. Due to the increased radiation output of the phones during the render process, women who are pregnant or are hoping to ever become pregnant should limit their exposure to FCPm Qmaster. Do not taunt Qmaster under any circumstances.)

And with our new Social Media plugin architecture, you can send custom notifications to Twitter, FaceBook, MySpace and even the Creative Cow Forums. Now all of your fellow editors will know just how frustrated you are by that request to make “one more small change”. Partner deals with Gowalla, FourSquare and DropBox are in the works for late 2010.

I am proud to say that I think we’ve really hit this one out of the park. And we’re just getting started. Since I started using FCP Mobile I’ve realized that having a full size computer is a thing of the past. I used to say I would never give up my Mac Pro. Now I’m starting to ask myself if it even makes sense to have an office. Since I started using FCPm I have barely bothered to show up to work at all.

Still not convinced?

Check out the cover story in the next issue of MacWorld magazine for a full hands on review or read our Press Release.

Can’t wait?

Head over to the App Store and download it now. We hope you’re as excited about it as we are.

With so many software programs and hardware only supported by the Intel based Mac computers, you might find that having that old Dual/Quad G5 around is becoming more and more problematic. And that may be true, especially as a production machine. More and more of the Apple and Adobe apps only support the newer processor, so upgrading starts to become difficult. Even Snow Leopard is only supported by Intel machines, so your G5 kind of gets stuck in time.

But I’m going to give you a few options to still make use of that older machine, and it will end up having more value to you than the few bucks you can fetch by selling it on eBay. Currently a Quad G5 (the last and fastest G5 made) is going for about $600, and that’s if you throw in a bunch of extra software/upgrades. And who wants to deal with shipping the beast anyway. My vote would be to keep the machine around and put it to work.

FileServer

One of the best things you can do is add more storage to the machine and have it as a file server. For example, in our office we have 3 main edit rooms, but there are many files that we use on jobs that are shared. We have a music library, stock footage, stock effects, some Editor Toolkit graphics, SFX, Custom Compressor Settings and many template items that we’ve created in house. We used to have all of these items installed on every computer in the office. Not a big deal, except when you make an update you have to make sure that every machine is updated with the same items or you quickly get out of sync. Having just one place to store it all is much more manageable.

Backup Server

Another option would be to add extra storage and make it a backup server that monitors the computers in your office and backups new files on a daily or weekly basis. You can do this using the new Retrospect 8 for the mac, or ChronoSync and Chrono Agent. Both packages work the same way, having a small client app running on your workstation, and the server software running on the backup machine. You select what you want to backup, when you want to back it up and where to. The nice part is that once it’s setup properly, you don’t have to keep remembering to back things up before you leave every night.

WIKI Server

Finally, you can install OSX Server (10.5) software and use it for workgroup management, contact files, file server and even a WIKI. We have a WIKI that we use for ECU (Edit Creations University) where we have all training materials, tips and tricks, job specific information, client FedEx numbers and even the employee manual. It’s all accessible to all employees whenever they need to reference anything, and any employee that has permission can add their own posts or revise posts that are there with new information. It becomes a very centralized location to store information, files, and video tutorials.

Creative Samples Database

Over the past 10 years I have slowly collected still images, QuickTime movies, DVD’s,  tv commercials, show opens, movie trailers and so on, of things that I found inspirational or creative. The main reason was that I wanted to have something to spark my creative juices when I was just dead in the water looking for a new idea. I don’t like to steal an idea directly, but there’s plenty you can take from any given example and than make it your own. Often just seeing something will spark an idea of your own.

I have so many samples now that I created a database called Creative Spark. Everything is processed into a friendly format and imported into the database. Once in there, it’s tagged for any number of attributes, from the type of video it is to what types of things is shows examples of (camera work, effects, text, graphics, etc.). This is the kind of thing that works great in a shared environment and it’s now accessible to any of the editors or producers in the office.

It also comes in handy when you’re trying to describe an effect or look to a client. It’s much more effective if you actually have the example right there to play for them.

TimeMachine Volume

Most people hook up an external drive for use with Apple’s TimeMachine. But by adding up to 6TB of internal space, you can do the same thing and take up no extra counter space. We have a TimeMachine volume on each edit computer that runs twice daily* to backup the active projects (and only the active projects). We’ve found this to be a very solid part of our overall backup strategy.

Whatever you decide to do with that G5, more storage is probably going to help. Today’s post will walk you through how to install more storage than you ever imagined in your aging G5 so that it’s up to snuff for you’re data needs.  Of the ideas I outlined above, all could be implemented on a single machine and play nicely, and in that case you would absolutely want to add more storage.

What You Will Need

A G5 Tower of any vintage (the photos here are from a Quad G5).

A Swift Data Kit for your model of G5. The kit includes…

Internal SATA card (you can purchase this with the kit as an add on option)

Up to 3 extra SATA drives (in addition to the 2 that your G5 normally holds)

One (1) open PCI, PCIX or PCI Express slot

Getting Started

Start by laying all of your parts out and making sure you have everything. I say this not only because it’s a good idea, but because I didn’t do this the first time and didn’t realize I was missing the SATA card until the machine was already stripped down. I was pretty bummed. TAKE 2!

Lay the mac on it’s side and take the side door off of your mac and remove the side cover and clear plastic internal cover.

Next, remove the fan assembly toward the front of the machine. It should just pull straight up.

Once the fan is out you will see a small metal screw in the near center of the bottom plate. This screw needs to be removed. Don’t worry, it’s not really holding anything in that you need to worry about.

Set the screw aside for now.

Next, it’s time to attach the brackets to your hard drives. In our case we went with 1TB Green Drives from Western Digital, but you can use larger 1.5 or 2TB drives if you wish.

The green drives are preferred for their lower power use, and it should be noted that Seagate drives are not supported, and I’ve personally had issues with Hitachi drives. To be safe, stick with WD greens. In my case I couldn’t get the computer to boot because the Hitachi drives were drawing too much power. With the WD drives this was not a issue.

Pay attention to how you connect the bracket. Your instinct may be to put the bracket on so that the bottom lip curls under the drive. However, the drive needs to curl away from the drive.

Repeat these steps until all 3 drives are brackets securely attached.

With all 3 drives mounted to brackets, it’s time to attach each of the drives to the base mount. As shown in the photos, attach each drive to the base using the supplied screws from the kit. It’s important that the drives are oriented as shown.

It seems like an odd way to mount the drives, but it’s actually very solid and the parts are well machined.

Next it’s time to insert the SATA card. We chose the Tempo Sata E4i which is recommend for our G5 model.

Take the card out of the packaging and attach the bight red cables to each of the ports. Be sure to plug the FLAT ends of the cables into the card, not the L shaped ones.

With all of the cables attached, gently insert the card into your open slot and secure it with a screw into the back of the machine.

Just leave the cables hanging out of the side of the box for now.

Next you need to hook up the power cable harness. At one in there is a Y type adaptor. What you need to do is pull the power from one of the current machine drives, and plug that power into one end of the Y adaptor. The other end of the Y adaptor goes back into that drive and you route the cable down the back of the machine. It’s basically a way to split off the power supply and share it with the drives you’re adding.

Again, leave the power cable hanging out the side of the box, but only after routing it down below the top shelf of the machine.

Now the fun part. It’s time to slide the drive assembly in. With the drive assembly right next to the computer, work from back to front hooking up both the power and SATA connections. Don’t worry about the cables being a mess, we’ll fix that later.

With everything hooked up, slowly and carefully slide the drives into the machine as shown, with the lip/screw hole part of the base facing the back of the machine.

Once you get the drives part way in, start to route the cables up and above the fan assembly and above where the cards go.

Once you have the drives in the machine, push the assembly toward the front and line up the plate so that the screw holes are aligned. Once aligned, use the longer screw that came with your kit and secure the plate to the base of the machine.

Reinset the fan assembly, close up the case and you’re good to go!

It’s snug, but it’s a perfect fit.

Time to Power Up

With a little luck, if you did everything correctly and used the recommended drives the machine will power up. Let the machine boot and use Disk Utilites to format the new drives however you would like. They can be added as 3 separate drives if you prefer, or you can raid them together. We created a raid 0 strip of the 3 to add a single 3TB volume.

If the machine turns on and off right away, chances are the power supply is overloaded. Make sure you used the correct drives. In some cases, you can try a few times in a row and it will finally start, but then you’re living on the edge a bit. Try to disconnect the power from one of the drives and see if it will start up then. If so, you may need to stick with only a 2-drive upgrade.

Why Is There An Airplane In My Room?!

Now that you’ve done all of this, there is one little down side that we noticed. Aside from it obviously sucking more power to drive all of the new storage, the fans in the machine run a LOT more. If you have this computer in a back room as a server this might not matter, but if it’s your main edit machine it might start to annoy you. We did this upgrade on 2 machines, one is a server in the back room with a bunch of other equipment, and one was to a Quad G5 that we still edit on (the upgrade shown in this example), so that we could do local TimeMachine backups once daily. The edit machine fans are audibly running a lot more and a lot louder than before. This is no real surprise when you think about all of the extra heat that’s being generated, but you should be aware of it.

Otherwise, it’s a very sold upgrade. We didn’t do any official benchmarks on the drives but the speed is much faster than any single internal drive, and more than adequate for a TimeMachine volume, file server or even video capture for all but the most high end formats.

The SuiteTake

Before you get rid of that old G5 tower, ask yourself if there’s anyway it can make your life easier by automating something for you, acting as a server or just being a internal FTP or file server. There are many tasks that don’t really need Quad-Octo-Pecto-IntelAMD-SuperHyper-Threading chips, and will run just fine on a G5. The value that can be provided by keeping the machine can far exceed any small amount of cash you might get from selling it on eBay.

This week I have the good fortune of getting out of the cold Chicago weather and editing in sunny California. I’m was brought out to do some on-site editing for Fender at the NAMM convention in Anaheim.

Like every travel job that I do, there are unique needs that needed to be addressed. No two jobs are exactly the same.  The needs of this job resulted in me having the most sophicated travel setup I’ve had to date. Here are the details of the job.

NAMM is a convention that showcases manufactures of musical instruments and gear. It’s kind of the NAB of the music industry. Fender has one whole floor of the convention center, and my job is specific to what they’re doing here. There are 3 main areas of their venue. The Stage, where there will be live performances, both planned and as people walk up and just want to jam. There is the exhibit area where booths are setup for all of the separate companies that are under the Fender umbrella. And then there’s the “floor”, where people are just socializing and moving from one place to the other. All of these are being covered by video, and as quickly as possible edited down and posted to the web on the Fender website as well as many social media sites.

The stage area is being covered by another editor who is recording the line feed and 3 iso cameras to AJA KI recorders.

He then takes specific performances (just single songs), cuts them down, adds bumpers on both sides and compresses it for the web. He then hands it off to one of the 3 web guys that take care of the online distribution.

As for my job, I’m handling the show floor and the booths, which is being covered by 2 roaming cameras shooting DVCPro50 widescreen on P2 cards. There is an assistant that will be running cards to and from the cameras whenever they think they got something special to post. That might be a good interview, a really kick ass performance by somebody jamming out, or an unexpected moment with a real rock star. It’s rumored that Eddie Van Halen may be showing up at some point.

So, my job started out sounding pretty simple, but the more we talked it through in the pre-production meeting we realized that the big issue is going to be time. Time to get the cards, time to download and wipe them, time to edit, and especially, time to compress the final video to flash so it can be uploaded. While this can easily all be done on a single machine, it didn’t seem like the best idea. So what we ended up with was a multiple station setup, all being run by a single operator (me).

So from left to right, here’s what I have setup.

P2 Ingest Station

This machine is a MacBookPro laptop with Final Cut Pro doing nothing other then logging and importing p2 footage. The client provided the p2 reader, which is way overkill for what we’re doing. But it does hold multiple cards and connects via USB. It’s really designed to do a lot more then just read cards, but hey… it looks pretty awesome as part of my setup.

The footage is all ingested over the network to the edit station, where I continue editing as the footage comes in (everything is networked via Gigabit Ethernet and a small 5 port switch. This also keeps me from having to copy footage from one machine to the other. All of the machines are using the same drive. It’s local to one machine, and remote to the other 2.

Edit Station

The edit station is another MacBookPro running FCP. On this machine I have a small Raid 0 strip of 2 G-Raid drives, giving me 1 TB of raided space and connected via FW800. I also have a 2TB Western Digital “My Book” drive that I’m using to mirror all of my work and captured footage on-site. I’m a big believer of having a duplicate or triplicate of everything when editing on the road.

As I bring in the footage I’m first sorting it into different sequences (as opposed to bins), one for each of the companies. At some point the producer will come in and quickly tell me what footage goes up and what does not.  I will then edit down the clips with clean ins and outs, add the company logo bumper on the in and out and export it into a compression watch folder.

Compression Station

The final stage is a MacPro Tower running Episode Pro. I customized it just for this job, and it is also using the same raid drive that both the P2 ingest machine and edit machine are using. So as soon as a file shows up in the watch folder, it starts compressing it using the preset that was already created and tested with the client. The output folder is a shared folder that the web crew has access to on their end of the network (upstream of my 5-port switch).

Pulling It All Together

While it would not be too difficult to slide my chair from machine to machine, I had an idea as I was testing the system. Why not use Apple Remote Desktop to control all 3 machines from the one 23″ monitor!

So, that’s what I’m doing. From the edit station, which has a large LCD hooked up, I have access to both of the other stations, and switching is very fast and easy since it’s all the same mouse and keyboard. What an awesome way to work!

Ready to Rock n’ Roll

So at this point, I’m pretty much playing the waiting game. I’m set up, I’ve tested, retested and tested again and everything is working as expected. It all gets put to the test tomorrow.

What’s this? Production gear reviews on a post-production blog? Yup, that’s right. We’re not all just codecs and compression here at SuiteTake; we do actually put on our shoes and socks and get to shoot too. In fact, there’s nothing better to appreciate parking your rear in a comfy edit chair all day long then luggin’ production gear around on an old fashioned shoot now and then.

So yes, we do shoot here too and have come across a few nifty little production gadgets that have proved very helpful in the field: The Lite Panels Micro Pro and Chimera’s Color Correction Screens for their softboxes.

Lite Panels Micro Pro Review

First the Lite Panel Micro Pro. We had a shoot come up where we were going to need to shoot close ups of a persons foot walking across a floor in a day-for-night situation. Looking at our standard Arri lighting kit there was nothing in there that would really do the trick for casting the small pool of light we would need to illuminate the foot as it walked across the floor. All of our instruments were just too big for the task, the smallest of our lights being a 300. We looked and found the Lite Panels Micro Pro and thought it would be the perfect fit.

The Lite Panel Micro Pro in its box

First, the construction. The Lite Panel Micro Pro right out of the box feels cheep, and at around $450 from B&H, it isn’t exactly cheep. The body is all plastic, but the not the good solid and refined plastic that you’d find in a Toyota or on an iPod, the cheep brittle plastic more akin to a carnival toy. It has 96 LEDs in a grid, is powered by 6 AAs or DC in (power source sold separately, but certainly something you could get at Radio Shack), has a power control dimming knob on top and standard screw-in shoe mount on the bottom. In the box is the Micro Pro, a flimsy shoe mount with ball head a CTO filter, warming filter, and diffusion filter.

The Lite Panel Micro Pro

While the Lite Panel Micro Pro feels and looks cheep in performance it is not, it has held up well to our production demands so far (which are rather light by comparison to more rigorous demands). I suspect that a drop or good whack to a c-stand could crack the casing, however, it should be noted that an LED won’t be damaged by an impact in the same way a tungsten bulb would. The shoe mount is the real weak link in the kit. It is flimsy and poorly made. When  you tighten down the stop on the ball head it causes the positioning of the panel to change significantly due to the pressure applied to the ball and socket making it futile to position the panel and then lock it down. What I have ended up doing is to tighten down the ball head to a mid-range of tightness and then just force adjust the panel to where I want it.

The included shoe mount plain sucks

The Lite Panel Micro Pro is balanced for daylight out of the box and the filters it comes with do a fine job of correcting to incandescent. They fit onto the front of the panel via slots on either side of the casing and hold in place well. There are also slots on the back of the panel to hold the filters when not in use, although our particular unit’s rear slots are too narrowly spaced to accommodate the filters so they are bowed when placed there. Not a big deal because they do stay put but it is annoying enough to me that I usually don’t keep them there. Battery life is excellent and the Lite Panel Micro Pro simply does not heat up one bit.

The rear of the Micro Pro

We were attracted to the Lite Panel because we thought it would be able to cast an even pool of light without the usual hot spots associated with traditional on-camera lights. In performance the Lite Panel Micro Pro was capable of both. The best thing about it is the adjustable power knob on the top of the unit. There are no stops, marks, or clicks in the knob, it’s just a smooth pot all around with a solid click to turn completely off. I like this because you can dial the intensity of the light to a virtually unlimited range. And that is really how this light needs to be used.

The power knob

The Lite Panel Micro Pro is not a key light. It should not be used as a main source of light in just about any situation. If you buy this light to act as a main source of light for quick head shots or interviews you’ll likely be disappointed. Rather it excels at being that little extra, that little kicker you need to add a little splash to the details of your scene. In our case we need a little punch down on the floor and it did an excellent job at that. I’ve found that I always use the panel at about 50-65% of its max power and have never used it at full power. When potted up to full power it just becomes a big raunchy hot spot like any other on-camera light. The key to using the Lite Panel Micro Pro is to pot it to 50-65% just to add a little bit of punch or kick to your scene, and we love it for that. We have found a use for it in just about every setup we’ve done.

The standard screw mount on the ball head adapter

It should be noted that while the shoe mount adapter is a piece of garbage it does have a standard tripod screw threading on the bottom of it so it can be directly attached to a photo ball head tripod or other light stand with a screw mount and used as an off-camera light. We do this all the time. Like I’ve said, the Lite Panel Micro Pro is a great little kicker, it’s NOT a key light. It’s small size allow it to be placed in tight spots where traditional fresnels won’t fit, and lack of heat make it safe in those small spaces as well. Yes, we are disappointed in the chincy construction but we absolutely love our Lite Panel Micro Pro.

A 3-way comparison of the Lite Panel's illumination

Chimera Color Correction Screen Review

Another cool little toy we have in our kit is a color correction screen for our Chimera soft box. Chimera makes several different flavors of color correction screens for their popular softboxes. They make 1/8, 1/4. 1/2, 3/4, and full versions of CTB and CTO for all sizes of their softboxes.

We had a shoot where we were going to need to shoot indoors with significant amounts of daylight coming through windows. Geling the windows with CTO wasn’t an option with the time and budget we had, neither was renting an HMI kit. I got to thinking that there had to be something out there to color correct Chimeras. In the past we had C-47′d CTB to the inside of our Chimera in a pinch and ended up getting marginal results and melted gels. I went looking and quickly found Chimera’s offerings. We got a 1/2 blue CTB color correction screen for our softbox.

The Chimera Color Correction Screen

The construction is excellent Chimera quality. To my surprise though, the screen is little more than a regular white front Chimera diffuser cloth with a regular CTB gel sewn to the back with velcro all around to attach it. The CTB is an actual gel! Because of this I do take a little extra care of it not to crinkle it too much and remove it when packing it away for the day. I roll it up and keep it in it’s original product box.

The light quality from it is great. It’s exactly what you’d expect from precisely positioning a CTB gel at the front of your softbox. Also as expected it does cut down the amount of light output according to the thickness of gel you are using. To compensate we sometimes remove the inner baffle from the softbox. We always remove the standard white diffuser from the front of our Chimera before attaching the color correction screen but I suppose if you wanted that extra diffusion and didn’t need the extra light output you could leave it on, there is room on the softbox’s velcro strip to accommodate both.

The front and back of the screen

We’ve used our screen in many mixed light situations (that’s primarily why we went with a 1/2 blue instead of a full blue) and it makes for a healthy white balance. It has proven to be indispensable when shooting in rooms with lots of windows. With a tool like this you can actually leave the blinds open and use that available light for a change!

The SuiteTake

The Lite Panel Micro Pro is an awesome little kicker light that has proved it worth many times over in a wide variety of shooting situations. It’s construction is sub-par and shoe mount is utter garbage but gives a great even splash of light quickly and easily right where you need it. The Lite Panel Micro Pro is very useful both on a off the camera. At almost $450 it’s priced a little on the high side, but you’ll be amazed at how often you’re able to use it in the field or the studio.

Chimera Color Correction Screens are great “poor-man’s” HMIs. At about $40 bucks a pop for the mid range sizes they are within just about anyone’s budget. With one of these slick screens say goodbye to the days of pulling all the shades and hello to using available light indoors again.

And yes, we do get off our butts now and then and do a little shooting here at SutieTake!

As promised here is part 2 of creating custom buttons and a chapter index automatically with DVD Studio Pro. You can find Part 1 here.

In this video tutorial we pick up right where we left off in the last tutorial and show you how to take the custom button we made and incorporate it into a custom menu. Then, with a little bit of setup, we take that custom menu, save it as a template and then use that template to automatically create a series of chapter index menus with one simple drag and drop.

A recap from part 1…

“One of the most tedious things to author in DVDSP is creating chapter index menus with links to all the various chapters within a project. If you’ve ever had a multi-hour long video with dozens of chapters, creating chapter index menus can take hours and be extremely frustrating, especially if you make a mistake or there are changes after the fact. This 2 part video tutorial will show you how to easily create custom buttons and menus, complete with video drop zones, save them as templates, and then automatically create a chapter index menu series with one simple drag and drop.”

The SuiteTake
Creating, linking, and authoring extensive DVD titles with lengthy and complicated chapter index’s can be tedious and time consuming. Using DVD Studio Pro’s built-in functionality you can easily create, save, and author extensive DVD chapter index menus with one simple drag and drop process.

Have you ever had a huge DVD project come across your desk that you just knew was going to be a nightmare to author? One of the most tedious things to author in DVDSP is creating chapter index menus with links to all the various chapters within a project. If you’ve ever had a multi-hour long video with dozens of chapters, creating chapter index menus can take hours and be extremely frustrating, especially if you make a mistake or there are changes after the fact.

Well, fear no more, there is actually a function built right into DVD Studio Pro that will create a chapter index for you automatically! All you need to do is either use one of DVDSP’s pre-made templates or easily create a template of your own then drag and drop; all the menus, buttons, text, and links are automatically created and set.

In this 2 part tutorial I’ll first show you how to make custom buttons, complete with video/image drop zones, that can be saved and inserted into any other menu. Part 2, coming later, will demonstrate how to incorporate those custom buttons into a custom menu, save it as a template, then create an entire 24-chapter index with one drag and drop.

The SuiteTake,
Creating, linking, and authoring extensive DVD titles with lengthy and complicated chapter index’s can be tedious and time consuming. Using DVD Studio Pro’s built-in functionality you can easily create, save, and author extensive DVD chapter index menus with one simple drag and drop process.

Ahh the joys of being a freelance editor. You get to make your own schedule, take time off whenever you want, sleep in on weekdays, pick and choose only the best, most highest-paying jobs, live the jet-set lifestyle hopping from post-house to post-house all across the country…

ZZZZZZCHHHHSSSSSWOOOOSSSSHHH (sound of vinyl record scratching)!

Wait, that’s not what it’s like at all. Probably back when you were in film school some eccentric tweed-jacket-with-the-patches-on-the-elbows professor filled your head with romantic notions like that. Then what happened, you got into the real world and found that most of the time you had to scrounge for any job you could get, from cutting your uncle’s boss’s LARPER themed wedding to that gastric surgery post-operative care demonstration video.

It seems like it was just yesterday

But that’s not the point, the point is that either you’re doing what you love or you’re considering cutting the cable and going out on your own or just graduating and still have that un-blemished innocent vision of the wealth of opportunity that awaits you out there. In any case, as a freelance editor, you need to focus on three main objectives: being a good editor, being mobile, and getting hired again. To do this you need to have a slick and portable system in place that enables you to jump from place to place, dive right in a get to work without wasting a lot of time getting situated. After all, your client is paying you to edit, not set preferences and adjust your chair.

Here are a few things you can do to make your setup time at a new place quick and easy and add value to your service.

Save your keyboard, button bars, window layouts and other preferences

The first thing you’ll want to do when you get to a new place, other than a quick height adjustment of the chair, is to load up your preferences. Save your preferred window layouts, keyboard layouts, button bars, column layouts and any other user preferences that are important to you on a USB stick or other portable device (one of my current favorites is a 8 gig USB stick that fits on a keychain, for under $30). All you need to do is then simply load up all of your preferences and go. There is no need to even copy your preferences to their respective places on the host’s computer. Once you load your window layout, for example, directly from your USB stick you eject it and keep working. FCP doesn’t need the preference file to remain mounted while you edit, just set it and forget it. The same goes for you button bars and keyboard.

If you do load your preferences to the host computer or change any of its preferences it’s always good practice to return the computer to the state it was in when you got there. Especially if you’re filling in for someone on vacation you don’t want them to come back to a totally re-arranged system.

Effects and Plug-Ins

Transporting window layouts and button bars is easy and a no-brainer. But what if you have a dozen or more effects saved in your effects favorites bin at home? If you do you probably use them all the time and it could be a big frustration if you didn’t have those effects readily available as favorites during gigs. But you can’t just save your effects favorites bin like you can keyboard layouts, or can you? The simple workaround is to create a new Final Cut Pro project, select all of your effects favorites from the favorites bin, copy them, and paste them into the new FCP project. Just save this project as “Effects Favorites” and bring it with you on your USB stick. While editing just have the project open or copy those effects to FCP’s favorites bin.

This is also a good practice to keep in general for when the need to reinstall or upgrade FCP arises. Having this Effects Favorites project handy will allow you to re-load all your favorites right along with windows and keyboards after an upgrade or reinstall.

Third party plug-ins are definitely a separate issue than stock FCP effects. Before transporting third party plug-ins you’ll need to sort out licensing issues and your client’s preferences on you adding plug-ins to their systems.

Turn this...

...Into this

Hard drive of tricks

One of the best things you can do as a freelancer is to not only be an outstanding editor but to bring something more to the table. Get a few hundred gig portable firewire drive and load it up with any kind of stock, music, image, graphic, bell and whistle you can think of. From HD clips of kids eating ice cream to heavy metal stock music to animated lower thirds, it can be a job saver to be able to pull out elements like this when in a pinch for some creative. It’s up to you whether you charge extra for things like this and it’s completely your responsibility to have proper licensing of all the material. Either way it will greatly impress your client when someone suggests opening the sequence with a etherial fly-through of puffy clouds and you just grab a clip of it off your hard drive and drop it in in a matter of 2 seconds.

Your Hard-Drive-of-Tricks

Everything but the kitchen sink

I’ve seen a lot of freelancers who carry their own keyboards and mouse/trackballs with them. If you prefer to edit with a specific colored keyboard or fancy-schmancy trackball then by all means bring it along and plug ‘er in. Believe me, your client doesn’t care whether you’re using a trackball, mighty mouse, or pencil and paper as long as you’re getting the job done.

If the venue or job calls for critical audio mixing and monitoring consider investing in a pair of high-quality headphones that you can travel with. Find a set that not only provides top-notch audio but fits your head comfortably. Who knows, you may walk into an office that only has cheepy computer speakers plugged into the built-in audio out. You could shrug and later blame the poor audio mix on the cheepy speakers or whip out your headphones and give them a real mix.

Some people, for extended jobs, even choose to bring their own chairs with them. If you tend to do long-term gigs then dropping a grand on a really good chair may be definitely worth it. Say you get a gig editing for 10 days where your edit station will be set up in the basement of the hotel that the conference is going on. You walk in and see a couple of folding chairs set up for you. It wouldn’t be long before you get to wishing you had a nice comfy desk chair to park yourself in for 14 hours at a time.

There's nothin' like gettin' paid to watch a render bar

It’s the little things

Being a good freelancer not only depends on the quality of work you do but also the kind of person you are to work with. Being easy and fun to work with largely depends on your own attitude and having some simple creature comforts at your desk can go a long way in that department.

You may want to read your clients a little bit before breaking things like this out but small trinkets or pictures of your family are not inappropriate. Especially if it’s a travel job, having a small photo of your kids next to your monitor can be nice, or planting a few wacky Pez-dispensers (full of Pez, of course) next to your coffee cup displays your personality in a subtle and fun way. The idea is that with a few small items like this you can make any place that you’re in that much more like home.

I keep a Rubik’s cube on my desk (a leftover prop from a shoot) and can’t tell you how often a client picks it up to fiddle with it while we’re working or discussing something.

Just leave some room for your Mac

The SuiteTake:

Clients pay you to edit, not click around for an hour in the morning setting up preferences. Get there early, whip out your USB stick, hard drive of tricks, headphones, chair, magic 8-ball or whatever and set up fast. Having all your preferences available to you will allow you to just be able to sit down and edit, not reset keyboards or try to remember what the defaults are.

Bringing additional materials like stock footage and animations can provide real value to your services and set you miles ahead of the other schmucks on their list.

Lastly don’t be afraid to pack a few personal items and other simple comforts, especially on extended travel gigs. You’re human after all and few comforts from home can make you feel a lot better during the long hours and express your personality in a subtle and fun way.

While writing this post I asked around to some of the producers in the office about things freelancers had brought that impressed them. All of them were able to remember editors from years ago who brought something personal and unique to the gigs, whether it was a tool or trinket. Do you want to make a lasting impression like that or be forgotten among all the rest?

In the end all of these practices add up to one thing: getting hired again.

Zaxwerks ProAnimator plug-in for After Effects is a great tool for creating 3D object animations right inside After Effects. We use it all the time for text and logo animations, animated background elements, and  various other elements.

Recently a project came across my desk that called for an intricate and precise animation of an airplane flying across a globe. The graphic was supposed to be your typical red line that traces itself across a globe hopping from country to country. A job for ProAnimator? Yes. Was there a catch? Yes.

The problem I faced even before I started was that as far as I knew there was no way to preview custom layer maps in the ProAnimator interface. I was going to have to create the globe and then animate its rotation precisely to the points that the “airplane” was supposed to travel to at the precise times. By default ProAnimator displays a generic place-holder image on your objects when you apply layer maps to them, you can’t preview the actual layer map within ProAnimator. This would obviously make for a lot of tedious trial and error when trying to precisely rotate the globe to specific countries.

There had to be a better way. A few emails back and fourth with my new best friend at Zaxwerks support and I had the answer. There is a way to preview layer maps in the ProAnimator interface! The tutorial below has all the details.

The SuiteTake:
We love ProAnimator here at SuiteTake and highly recommend it. As you delve deeper and deeper into the application you discover more and more things that it can do. The convenience it offers as a plug-in to After Effects is a big productivity boost as well. What I thought to be a rather big limitation of the software is no longer an issue after learning this little trick. By being able to preview layer maps in the ProAnimator interface I feel that it can tackle an even wider variety of 3D projects than I ever thought possible.

In a nutshell, the main focus of this post is to keep your project and media organized in a way that allows any editor to pickup your project and have a pretty good sense of what’s going on. By following these steps you’ll also be more efficient, save yourself time and be more likely to avoid costly mistakes

This is part 1 of 2 parts and I’ll focus on pre-editing organization and proper setup of your edit system and project. Part 2 will cover editing media management, proper use of timeline tracks and exporting/final output and long term archival.

Use of Project numbers
Everything we do at Edit Creations, from the very start of the project until the media is removed from the system, and even invoicing, is based on the project number. And every project has it’s own unique number. We use a simple FMP (FileMaker Pro) database to create and keep track of our jobs so that we know what numbers are used for what jobs. This same database is where we track the project name as well (more on that later). While we do this with a FMP database, you can do it with a spreadsheet, or even a “New Jobs” notebook. What’s important is that you do it and have a way to track what the next unused number is.

What we’ve chosen to do is use a format of ECJ-XX-XXXX, where ECJ = Edit Creations Job, XX = the current year, and XXXX is a sequential number that continues to increment by 1 every time a new job is created. For example, a current job number as of this writing is ECJ-09-0591. So at a glance we can tell that it’s a 2009 job, and that it’s more recent then say 09-0590. We can also tell that the job is for Edit Creations, our main company. We also have a sister company called Timeline Creative, and if it was a job for that company it would start with TLC to differentiate it.

You can append any amount of information that you like. For example if you had jobs for shooting vs editing, you could add a designation of “PROD” and POST” to your system. So a job number could be 2009-0591-PROD for the production, and 2009-0591-POST for the post production. In doing this you could keep track of different stages of the same job with ease.

If you were working on a broadcast series you might use the season and episode codes, instead of having a number that sequences like we do, you could have a number that was a date based code (for example 09-0342 would tell you that the job was created on the 342 day of 2009).

The point is, come up with a system that is helpful to YOU and YOUR workflow based on the information that is important to you. One size does not fit all here and there is no right or wrong.

Using a database gives us the option to do nifty things like create the project folder/FCP project file name from the information that is typed in when the job is created, and then format it properly so that it can be pasted into the finder where needed. New job information is transferred both to the project folder, and to the FCP project file for every job.

Project Names

Project names should have some consistency and formatting as well. It’s a balance between making the project name descriptive enough that there’s value in the name, but not making it a paragraph long.

For us that means starting with the END client (not our direct client), a short descriptive name that describes the project, and if it makes sense the year, episode number or some other time based info. This is important because we have some reoccurring jobs that have the same title every year, so the date is the only information that differentiates each project.

So for us, the format looks like this.

Job Number – End Client – Descriptive Title – Time Information.

Or more specifically,

ECJ-09-0420- Kmart, Making The Sale – Episode 007

or

EJC-09-0452 – Lions Quarterly – Fall 2009

This is about as long as we would make a project title. Again, think about what works for you and come up with your own system.

Proper setup of FCP scratch disk
Ask 10 different editors how to properly setup the scratch disk and you’ll get 10 different answers, possibly some very heated opinions. I will admit that based on your workflow one way may work better then another, but in my personal experience there is only one way that avoids all of the common headaches and pitfalls.

Set it and Forget it (yes, just like the informercial)

FCP does a pretty good job of keeping things organized if you just let it do its job, and if you are consistent with your use of project names and numbers, there’s no reason not to let FCP do this job for you.

Note – this screen shot includes jobs that were created before we added the “ECJ” prefix. Without it, on occasion we had problems with folders that were not part of a job being selected during the deleting process, because a dated folder may be the same number as a job number, yet have no association with that project.

When you create a new project, the name you choose for that project is what determines the name of your capture scratch folder, along with the associated render files and auto-save folders. If you always keep your capture scratch set to the same folder, FCP will keep everything organized by project. The files will be where FCP expects to find them and you’ll avoid the dreaded “Media Off Line” screen or having to re-link all of your media.

The biggest benefit (to me anyway) is how this streamlines the removal of projects from the system. Do a search for the job number or project name, and all files and folders associated with that job show up in a single window so that you can review and delete them. You can even do this over the network with multiple machines if more then one computer was working on a project. This will save you having to hunt down every file associated with a job across various drives or computers.

One special note about this way of searching for files. In the Tiger OS you could create a restrictive search right in the finder using “custom locations”. I would narrow the search to the Final Cut Pro Documents folder on each machine I wanted to search for and get a very narrowed down list of files that I knew were in locations that were safe to delete.

It appears that this feature was removed in Leopard (correct me if I’m wrong but I can’t find it to save my life). There is no way to add custom locations, so for this process I use a program called Path Finder. It gives me the option of doing what I used to do in Tiger and is a bit more elegant at it as well.

For me personally, I just can’t come up with a reason not to lock down the location of the capture scratch folder, but I can think of some problems you’ll have if you don’t.

The biggest issue is nesting. I’ve seen it time and time again when the capture scratch folder is moved around to different folders, different drives and so on. At some point, because the same folder is not always being chosen, you end up with a capture scratch folder, inside a capture scratch folder, inside a capture scratch folder and so on.

Another down side is changing the capture scratch to a location that is not a permanent location on the machine, like an external or removable drive. Maybe you’re running low on space and hook up an extra FW drive to capture to, but later somebody takes that drive to another location to do other work and it’s no longer available the next time you open your project. Then you’re stuck trying to track down that drive only to find out that the other editor or a producer took it home so that they could screen footage! Ahh!

The cost of a decent drive is very reasonable these days and the cost per gigabyte continues to drop year to year. So if you’re running low on space, add another drive! But make sure it’s a fixture on that system, just as if it were an internal drive. Throw a label on the drive if you have to warning others to not disconnect the drive.

Proper Setup For Your Project
It wasn’t all that long ago that everything was more or less edited in a single format. For me, everything came to me on Beta SP or DigiBeta, we digitized it to uncompressed SD, and edited it 4×3 uncompressed (usually 8-bit to save a little space). It was simple, 4×3, 720×486, 29.97 fps.

Now, you not only have many possible sources of footage with different resolutions, frame format and time base, but what you master/output to is a whole other decision.

As an example, I recently did a project that had all of the following.

• Beta SP, 4×3
• DigiBeta, 16×9 Anamorphic
• Panasonic DVCProHD 720p30 (and a few 1080i shots)
• Panasonic AVCHD 1080i
• DVCam 4×3
• DVD Footage imported form a PAL DVD

Based on the source footage, there is no obvious choice as to what your sequence settings should be. So after asking the producer questions about the final distribution, expected shelf life of the project and so on, I decided to edit 16×9 HD at 720, 29.97 fps, with ProRes as the codec.

One thing that’s overlooked by many editors is that you do not have to edit in the same format that your source footage is, and you don’t have to transcode everything to a common format. You can do these things, but you don’t have to. We’ve had really good results using FCP’s multi-format timeline and working in ProRes. Yes, you will be rendering more then if everything was native, but with a fast enough machine you can continue to work in real-time even with the footage unrendered.

The point I’m trying to make is, every time you start a new project it’s critical to know the answers to several questions.

• What formats do you anticipate using as source footage?
• Roughly, what percentages of each format?
• What is our final delivery (tape, on-line, DVD, portable devices)?
• Will the video have a life elsewhere other then it’s intended delivery?
• Do you have PAL footage (or other formats that you don’t usually work with)?
• Do you have any graphic elements that are already in one format or another?

One thing I want to stress is to not only ask about the intended use, but any other possible uses outside of that down the road.

For example, I had a client once that insisted that the video would only be used for the web, and thus they told us to use the full image raster for graphics and text. When I really pushed the question and asked “So you don’t think you’ll ever do any DVD’s of this?”, they answered “Well, yes we’ll probably do DVD’s down the road for distribution and for any press requests”. Well, that changes things – a lot.

If I had not asked that question, we would have had all sorts of title and video safe problems down the road when they sprung it on us to make the DVD version. As it turned out, we just kept everything broadcast safe and it was OK for both purposes. It’s because of this one experience that I push to never use full raster unless it’s for a specific event and has no life after that (for example, Watchout videos which are very targeted and have a short shelf life).

Once you have all of the information you need to make an informed decision, it’s time to setup your FCP project file with the proper settings. Using the Easy Setup feature of FCP, this is pretty simple.

The bulk of our work these days is done in 720p, 29.79, ProRes. Unless we have ALL 4×3 material, we’ve had great success pillar boxing 4×3 video, blowing it up or just coming up with a creative treatment to make it play nice inside the 16×9 frame. Once you get used to editing in 16×9 it’s really hard to go back. I can’t say the opposite is true.

Once the project is formatted, we make it a point to always note the master sequence settings as one of the first folders in the project (this is actually part of our template). This way as we switch from job to job, or if another editor has to continue with a job that he/she didn’t start it’s obvious how to properly setup the project.

Importing or digitizing media (camera originals)

DIGITIZING
Time spent organizing your footage on import/capture is time well spent. I can’t tell you the number of times I’ve seen people digitize tapes with the clip name “untitled”. In one case, I had a freelance editor that captured 2 hours of footage broken into about 150 clips, and it was all named “untitled_01, untitled_02…”. His idea was to go back and name the clips inside of FCP later so that they made sense. But back then (using FCP 5) there was not a way to rename the files on the hard drive to match the clip names. So your clip names had no obvious or logical connection to the file names. What a pain! This is a sure sign of inexperience and lack of professionalism. Just do it right from the start!

I understand there are times that you may not log and capture with super detailed names, but there are better ways then just “untitled”. If you have to capture a whole tape, or multiple clips from a tape, at least use something that gives you even the slightest amount of info.

Here are some examples.

• WaterPark_shoot_01, 02, 03…
• CameraA_Day1_01, 02, 03…
• Camera_Dan_ConventionCenter_01,02,03…

When you use a title in this way FCP will automatically increment up the number while retaining the original name, thus giving you some information to go on with a very minimal amount of effort on your part.

IMPORTING
For importing tapeless camera originals the work flow is different for different producers. And they’re both on opposite extremes.

Some producers will take the time to log the shots they need and provide just those clips, carefully named and organized. Others will give me the 10 hours of footage that they shot and ask me to import everything. From there they just write the timecode notes into the script, more like the old days of working in a tape based on-line room. I always try to stay flexible and adapt to how the producer prefers to work, instead of asking them to adapt to my way of working.

OTHER MEDIA FILES
(non camera originals)

While FCP handles the organization of tapeless media and digitizing tapes, what about other elements? You might get photos off of a CD, download some music or VO files, create some PS files along the way or other motion graphic elements. They might come from various locations on your system, the network, removable drive, USB key or optical media. Where does all of this go?

Again, this is where having the template really helps (if you have not read my post about using a project folder, check it out). Our system is to have any media that did not automatically go to the Capture Scratch folder, located inside of the project folder. There are no exceptions. That means files from any source are first copied into the project folder, and then imported into FCP so that they are properly referenced under the umbrella of that job.

There is never cross pollination of elements between projects, because if something is used in a project is should be part of that job folder. Even if that means duplicating some assets so that they’re in two locations. It’s not uncommon for a client to want to steal a shot or two from one of their other projects that’s still on the system. That’s not a problem, but whatever is “stolen” must first be copied to the current project, and then imported.

Why so strict? Getting burned, that’s why.

In the past before we established this rule, shots from several projects would be shared. On multiple occasions we would clean off a few long finished projects only to find out the next day that the “media off line” screen plagued several other projects that were using some of the deleted media and not yet done. That’s no longer a problem.

What’s in Part 2?
In the next installment of this epic post I’ll cover proper use of timeline tracks, versioning, nesting and why I never use it, exporting and finally proper long term archival using the new LTO drive from Cache~A.

Check Out the Popular Shane Ross DVD.
For a more in-depth look at keeping your workflow organized, check out Shane Ross’s DVD. It covers everything here and more in great detail, and is a bit more visual then reading a blog post.

Order It Now

And now, introducing the SuiteTake App Store! Well, ok not really. It just seams as though everybody is getting rich selling apps these days so why not jump up on that band-wagon? The proliferation of the iPhone App Store, and the many others imitators from Verizon, T-Mobile, Sprint, and on and on, it’s important to take a step back every now and then and remember that they still do make cool apps for regular computers too. And it may be hard to believe but some of them actually aren’t flashlights.

The following is a brief list of 5 cool apps that we just love to have on all our Macs. All 5 are what I would call utility and workflow type apps, they’re not things like After Effects or Firefox, apps that are essentially the core function of your Mac. These are little ditties that just make life, and work, that much easier.

Everyone goes through a learning curve when it come to technology and computers. You begin as a novice and learn more and more over time until you become very streamlined and efficient with the tasks you do everyday, whether it’s crunching spreadsheets or compositing layers. Even though the latest and greatest versions of OSX and Windows have come a long way to improving upon the efficient user experience they still leave a lot of things up to third parties to fill in the gaps. For most of us there will come a time in our learning curve where we have become so advanced and efficient that our software actually gets in our way, we can think and process what we want to do much faster than we can type and click. These few apps go a long way in solving these types of problems.

iStat Menus

This nifty app lives at the top of your menu bar

This nifty little app is a great for those of us who need to see whats happening under the hood of our Macs. It’s a complete system monitoring app that displays information as tiny icons at the top of your menu bar. It monitors in real time your CPU and Memory, Date and time, drives, network, and temps fans and power. Everything is customizable and user configurable via a pane in your system preferences. You can select which items you want to see, change their appearance, and even their order from left to right.

I find iStat most useful in two ways. First, by monitoring the network and CPUs I can see at a glance the status of any processes that are going on and whether or not they have stalled. All of a sudden I may notice that an app has crashed and is pegging the CPUs, I can then just force quit the app and go on without any more trouble. And secondly, this one of those small things that I just love about apps like this, is that the OSX menu bar does not include the date as a number, it can only display the day of the week. iStat Menu displays a little iCal looking calendar page right next to OSX’s day and time. I use this feature every single day and love it.

iStat Menus is free (with a suggested donation) from the fine folks at iSlayer.com

Default Folder X

DFX adds a translucent border to your open and save dialogues

Default Folder X is an app that now that I have it I don’t know how I ever worked without it. Directly from their website: “Default Folder X makes Mac OS X’s Open and Save dialogs work as quickly as you do.” One of the biggest time wasters in any workflow when you have to deal with a lot of files and folders is opening and saving and just navigating through endless strings of folders upon folders. When I want to open or save something I just want to hit a key and bam, move on. Default Folder X adds a translucent overlay to your open and save dialogue boxes that offers several time-saving shortcuts. These shortcuts point straight to recent, open, and favorite folders that you can customize and even delegate among different applications. It beefs up spotlight’s power by allowing you to add your own search keywords on the fly. One feature of Default Folder X that I was amazed wasn’t part of OSX is the addition of hierarchical pop-up menus. You can easily mouse through the menus straight to the folder you need without click after click.

I have found that the recent destination button and being able to select already open Finder windows as the most useful. There are loads of other features that I simply haven’t gotten around to customizing yet, probably because I’m so happy with the few that I use daily.

Default Folder X is well worth it at $34.95 from the people at St. Clair Software

LaunchBar

Take this Dock!

LaunchBar is perfect for those of use who are keyboard shortcut obsessed, which, as editors, most of us are. If you are keyboard shortcut obsessed then you strive to do as much as possible without ever touching a mouse. You know all the commands in FCP, AE, PS, OSX, and even their Windows equivalents whenever the need arises. You even know the illusive CNTRL+EJECT command to activate the Shutdown/Sleep/Restart box. LaunchBar is for you. The best way to use LaunchBar is to set it up to automatically launch at login. It is activated by a configurable shortcut, we use CNTRL+Space. When you enter the shortcut a little menu drops down from underneath your menu bar, you then begin typing what you want to do. Most commonly this is the name of an application you want to launch. For instance, when I want to launch FInal Cut Pro I press CNTRL+Space then F-I-N. As soon as you begin typing a contextual menu drops down with suggestions that match what you are typing, when Final Cut Pro appears just hit enter and the app launches. LaunchBar remembers what keystrokes you use to launch what apps and makes life even easier. When I want to launch Mail all I need to do is type CNTRL+Space, M, and Enter. Now I’m not knocking the Dock, it’s fast and convenient, but for a keyboard shortcut junkie LaunchBar is the way to go.

There are dozens of additional features packed into LaunchBar from Spotlight searching, recent documents, web searching, iTunes browsing, Address Book entries, and so on. I love it for simply launching apps and constantly find myself hitting CNTRL+Space on Macs that don’t have it.

LaunchBar is approximately $34, actually €24.00, from the folks across the pond at Objective Development (They also make Little Snitch which is another gem)

1Password

Try and steal my HampsterDance.com login now!

It seems as though you can’t check the weather these days without logging in with some username and password. Username and password overload is a real problem these days with having literally dozens of logins all across the internet from Amazon, to eBay, to your bank, even SuiteTake! Very commonly people, myself included, resort to using the same username and password again and again across multiple sites just to allow yourself a fighting chance at actually remembering one. it doesn’t take an internet security genius to figure out that this can be a huge security risk to your business and personal life.

1Password is a utility that creates, stores, and recalls strong passwords for you right in your web browser. Any time you go a site where a password is required shortcuts that install in your browser allow you to create a password, that can be customized from simple to incredibly complicated, enter it in the proper fields then stores it for subsequent use. When you return to the site later you just hit the 1Password button and it autofills your password information. It works with almost any common web browser like Safari, Firefox, and Opera.

There’s not much more that needs to be said, if a thief managed to get one of your un-secure passwords they could run amok all over the internet with it. Using 1Password easily thwarts would-be criminals.

1Password also saves credit card information to speed up checkout processes and has portability features that allow you to access your saved password information when you’re at a computer other than yours. A handy iPhone app is also available. It is $39.95 from Agile Web Solutions.

MPEG Streamclip

De-mux anything that needs de-muxing.

Ok, this one falls out of the same categories as the apps above but I had to include it because this app has been a savior countless times across editing forums.

Have you ever needed to de-mux a DVD VOB file? If you’re an editor of any kind, yes, yes you have been given a DVD Video and been asked to incorporate it into a project. Hum, what the heck is a VOB file? Certainly not a edit friendly format.

MPEG Streamclip is a video converter app that, among many other things, can de-mux DVD VOB files to user-friendly Quicktime and Windows formats. Just pop in a DVD, select your settings and walk away as it converts everything for you.

Yes, there are many apps out there that do the same things that MPEG Streamclip does but the catch is that MPEG Streamclip is free! Yes, it’s a free app that is in version 1.9.2 and has been around for years. And yes, it does work and is reliable enough for a professional environment.

MPEG Streamclip Free at Squared 5

The SuiteTake

If you’re not there yet, one day you’ll get to a point where your efficiency with you computer outpaces your ability to click and type fast enough. There are hundreds of useful apps like these out there that go a long way in helping improve upon that efficiency and overall user experience. these are just 5 of them, the list could go on and on and on. The best part is that the most expensive app listed here is less than 40 bucks. Drop a little cash and save yourself hours of frustration.

And please, offer your favorite gems bellow as comments. I’m sure there are loads of apps out there yet to be discovered, we’d love to hear about them.

I’ve been an editor for a while now at several different shops. Through those days and places I have mostly been self taught until I ended up here with SuiteTake. At SuiteTake training and skill development is not just encouraged, it’s part of our daily responsibilities. Therefor, in the recent past my learning curve has increased dramatically.

The Top Ten things I wish I knew:

10. Shift and option dragging

9. Quick Ken Burns effect

8. QuickTime vs Quicktime Conversion.

7. The Black and code button.

6. Option 1,2,3 for transition alignment

5. Esc, tab, spacebar to navigate windows

4. Apply normalization to audio in FCP

3. Disable dropped frames warning.

2. Disable rendering with caps lock.

1. Map your keyboard.

The SuiteTake Take?

If you’re an experienced editor you probably know most of these already, however, if you’re just starting out like me so many years ago you’ll be putting yourself ahead of the game by learning these tricks now and not 10 years from now.

The following video tutorial demonstrates a list of 10 efficiencies and workflows with Final Cut Pro that I wish I had known from the start. If I had these often simple tricks in my pocket from day 1 I would have saved myself countless hours and heaps of frustration.

First home edit suite, 2003

Basement edit suite, 2004

Luckily, the home edit suite was short lived. In less then a year my wife and I had outgrown it and had to get office space or we would lose some of the larger jobs. The separation of work from home life was back in balance. However, there have been times that I wished the suite was back at home. It’s one thing to stick around the office to edit, but it’s another to stick around watching a render bar or compression bar just so you can finish and upload a file. What if you could do this from home? And what if it was free to you assuming that you already have a high speed internet connection at your home and office? Well, I’m hear to tell you that the solution is not only out there, but it’s a lot easier to get setup then you might think.

I’m sure by now everybody knows about MobileMe and Back To My Mac on the Macintosh (just try to get Back To My Mac working reliably though) and services like GoToMyPC.com (now supporting the Mac platform). There is also a client/server based service called HamachiX for Mac, but I could never get that to work reliably and it would often get very frustrating. About a year ago I found a free service called LogMeIn.com, which supports both Mac and PC. They’re goal is to get you hooked on their free service, and then have you upgrade to one of their paid accounts. But for what i use it for the free version is perfect. I now have several computers registered with them and use it at least weekly, sometimes every day. It has become an important tool in my toolbox.

How It Works
The concept is very simple. You create an account at LogMeIn.com. Make sure you sign up for the free service to start, it’s not always obvious that it’s available. I actually had trouble finding it when I started writing this article. Once you have an account, you download the client software that you install on every computer that you want to control. The installation is very fast, and during the setup you enter some account information that they provide you when you setup your account.

Once you install the software, it takes you to the LogMeIn.com website and registers that computer as one of your computers. You’re able to keep everything in one master list of computers, or create groups of different computers as I’ve done here.

One of the great and flawless things that the LogMeIn.com service does is get around all of the routers hubs and firewalls of your network. Our network is by no means complicated, but it’s not just an open network either. We have a cable modem, Apple Airport Extreme router, and about 5 switches in multiple locations on the network. And not once have I had a problem navigating through all of that to the machine I wanted. Hell, I can’t even get iChat to work at the office half the time.

At home it’s a similar setup. Cable modem, Time Machine wireless router and a few switches. There have even been a few times that I was at Panera Bread and wanted to start downloading something on the server at the office, and did so with great success. That says a lot because if you’ve spent any time on the free wifi from Panera, you know how painfully slow and frustrating it can be.

If you want to get really crazy, there is an iPhone application from LogMeIn.com as well, allowing you to perform all of the same functions but using your iPhone. I have not tried this, but if you have please leave a comment and share your thoughts.

Putting It To Use
Once you’ve setup one or more computers, it’s just a matter of logging into the LogMeIn.com home page and you’re taken to your list of registered computers. From the list you can tell which ones are on-line and available, and which ones are not. Just click on the computer, enter a name and password and you’re in. Your browser window transforms into the desktop of the connected computer, or you can make it full screen and get the full experience being in front of the remote computer. Nearly all keyboard shortcuts that you would use locally work as expected (I’ve found a few that do not and randomly quit the browser).

This is one of those situations where seeing it in action goes a lot further then me telling you. See my real-time demonstration of it at work by watching the video at the end of this post.

How This Can Help You In Your Business
I have found many uses for LogMeIn. The initial problem was getting used to the idea that I didn’t have to hang out at the office for everything that needed to get done. Here are a few examples.

Post Edit Output
By far the biggest use we’ve had for it is web approvals. For example, it’s the end of the day and you’re finally ready to show the client your masterpiece. The typical process for us is the export a self-contained QuickTime Movie to the project folder, take that into compressor and create a H.264 QT movie file optimized for the web, take the output from compressor and into our Dreamweaver Template, create a web approval page with all of the necessary details, sync that to the server and send the client the approval link. With the exception of the compressor step, it all goes very quick. But unfortunately, if we have a long video to post the compressor step can take anywhere from 30 minutes to 2-3 hours (we’ve tested the Elgato Turbo.264 USB key, but the output is not as good and the files tend to be larger. It is fast though).

Using LogMeIn.com, this has changed. When the edit is over and the master is exported, we take into compressor and start the conversion. We prep the web page with everything except for the final video file, and leave. Then the editor, from home that evening checks in when the file is done being compressed (we’re sent email notifications from compressor as each file finishes – or fails), finishes the web page and sends the link via email on the edit computer. Total time spent about 5 minutes. The big differences is that all of the time you would have waited around, is now spent at home.

Check The Status
From checking the progress of an AE render, FCP export or making sure a large copy in the finder completed, getting peace of mind is fast and easy. How many times have you left something going in compressor just to find out that it crashed 5 minutes after you left and you had no idea. Now, even if you can’t fix it remotely, you know what you’re in for before you get there.

We’ve also used it to check on large DVD runs. Our duplicator usually runs flawlessly, but on runs of 500 or more it occasionally gets hung up and has to be reset. Again, in this case there’s not much we can do to fix the problem remotely, but just knowing that somebody has to go in early to fix so that we make the deadline it is a huge help.

Creating DVD’s
While this is not an ideal way to create a DVD by any means, in a pinch it can be very helpful. There have been a handful of occasions that I received a last minute panicked call that a client now wanted a DVD instead of a web approval. At the very least I could login and start the compression so that the DVD was a quick output in the morning. In most cases though I can get the entire process done right up to saving a disk image that the assistant can burn as soon as he gets in and then messenger it out.

Grab Files Remotely
While the edit computers themselves can not share files outside of the office, it’s no big deal to login to grab some files and upload them to a FTP server so that they can be downloaded elsewhere. When I was out of town on a remote job there was a situation where I needed a graphic element from a current job that I had forgot to bring with me. It was an animated background in QT format. No problem. I logged into the edit system, dragged the QT movie to a program called FileChute, and emailed myself the link from the edit system. Ten minutes later I had the file downloaded on my remote edit system and the client was blown away (these sorts of things can really make you look like a hero).

These are just some of the ways we’ve found it can help. I’m sure based on your own projects and work flow you’ll come up with new ones of your own. If you do, feel free to leave a comment on the blog and share it with others.

See For Yourself
Click on the link below to see a real-time demonstration of just how easy it is. To sign up for your own free account, just go to LogMeIn.com and you’ll be up and running in just minutes.

Ahhh the age old struggle between Final Cut Pro and After Effects. For what seems like centuries now us Final Cut Pro editors have been struggling with finding an efficient and, moreover, convenient workflow between FCP and After Effects. Sure, products like Livetype and Motion have come along and made life easier for some tasks but when it comes down to real motion graphics work and serious compositing nothing beats After Effects. Have you ever put Motion’s Primatte RT side by side with a key pulled from After Effects Keylight? To me there’s no comparison.

Coming from an editor’s chair, not a designer’s, it took me a while to really get up to speed with After Effects. In the past I was using AE infrequently for several reasons: 1. I didn’t know the interface and key commands well, 2. I didn’t know the software’s capabilities well, 3. I was intimidated by the rigid workflow between FCP and AE. All these factors equaled inefficent workflow and so I just usually opted not to use AE in favor of a faster and more flexible option like Livetype or Motion.

However, in the past year the work we have been doing has called more and more for serious graphics design and compositing, Livetype and Motion were simply not going to cut it. So I buckled down and really learned the After Effects interface, key commands and it’s capabilities. Through that hard work I quickly became much more efficent with AE and started creating some really cool stuff. But all this new-found efficency with AE itself still did nothing to help with a round-trip workflow to and from FCP. And if we can assume anything about Apple and Adobe there will probably never be an intergrated roundtrip solution between the two.

Now of course there are 3rd party solutions out there that help with this problem (at least half of the problem anyway). Automatic Duck is a great 3rd party solution that exports Final Cut Pro projects and timelines in a format that After Effects understands and converts to compositions. Bam, you’ve got half of the roundtrip issue solved right there, prepare a timline in FCP and export with Automatic Duck into AE and take care of your graphics and compositing. The problems? Output is still the same, you must render your comps out of AE and import them into FCP just like always. Then later if changes are needed you must go back to AE, make your changes, and re-render the revised comp and import back into FCP. The other problem, Automatic Duck is expensive. If you’re a home business or just struggling like everyone else in this economy buying the plug-in may not be an option.

I call this solution The Manual Duck. It doesn’t involve any special plug-ins or any other software, it’s just a few simple steps to add to the workflow that can make the trip to and from AE much easier, and more importantly, leave less room for errors requiring revisions in After Effects later.

I had a job recently where I knew that I was probably going to need to do almost entirely in After Effects. It was an image piece that involved nothing but text builds and a few stock images. The producers instructions were simply to take the “boring” corporate message and make it just “look cool.” Ahhh, is there anything better then the old “Just make it look cool…” line? And what’s more, from listening to the music that was selected, it was going to be a music driven edit.

In my opinion After Effects is not a good audio editor from a workflow perspective and have to cut to music in After Effects can be a big hassle being that there’s no “real” real-time playback or scrubbing of audio. All this added up to a perfect candidate for The Manual Duck workflow.

It’s simple really, start in Final Cut Pro. I laid down the music track in an empty timeline and made the audio edit (the track did need to be cut down and mixed a bit). Once I was happy with the audio I started to block out what I wanted the shots to be using the built-in text tool. I had the script and knew what order the text build had to go in. With the text tool I was able to very quickly block out where the individual sentences would go. I went along through the song and timed out all the text builds adding no style or animation of any sort. The key to this step is the speed at which you can work, just copy-paste the text clips from one edit to the next and copy-paste the next sentence from the script into the text tool. Format just a bit so the lines can be read and that’s all you need to do. Of course, if your project is more complex you can get as complex as you’d like during this step, adding images, transitions, etc. The point is that you lay everything down and time everything out in Final Cut Pro where you have quick real-time editing available with no significant render or RAM preview time.

The project blocked out in a FCP timeline

From there export the timeline to a codec that After Effects will play well with. Import that QT into AE and drop it into your Comp. From here you can proceed in the manner you prefer best. You can scrub through the Comp and add markers at the edit points or do split-track edits. Either way you can quickly scrub the Comp and see where you made edits in FCP with no need for audio playback or scrubbing. Also you now have a base layer that acts as a virtual storyboard. As you build your effects and composite you can easily solo the base QT layer to see what you blocked out next.

The FCP QT imported into an AE Comp

As a side note I after I have made my markers or split tracks I turn off the visibility and lock this layer to ease RAM preview time and avoid offsetting the layer with a stray drag.

The final composite

Now there’s nothing automated about the process and it doesn’t add any sort of round-tripping between the two but I’ve found that it helps a great deal with being efficient once in After Effects and leaves far less room for errors and mis-timimg. If you can build your graphics and composite and get it right the first time that is far more valuable than the extra time it took to block the project in Final Cut Pro.

We looked at all the options out there in the sub 10K price range, and after weeks of research ended up with a Sony EX-1. That really surprised me because when we started the search I was pretty much set on the Panasonic P2 format and the AG-HVX200A model. Not only do I have experience with that camera, but almost everything else we do is shot in the DVCPro HD format, so we have a nice workflow in place. More then that though, I can’t stand editing in the MPEG-2 format. It’s fine for shooting and can capture great images, but once you get it into the edit system you can be assured you will rendering more then ever before. But in the end, the Sony EX-1 won hands down in image quality, built in features, and price. There was just no denying it.

So, what to do with the workflow?

On the first several projects we tried multiple different ways of attacking the projects. Everything from working in the MPEG-2 format natively to converting everything to ProRes and editing with the converted files instead. We also have extensive experience working with the Sony software, which includes XDCam EX Clip Browser and XDCam Transfer.

In addition to all of this trial and error, I was training a client on how to handle the workflow for his own project (he was renting our camera). But it seemed every time I met with him I was saying “OK, I know I said do it like this, but now there’s a whole new way to do it”. Nothing like learning on the job to keep everybody on edge!

So here we are now, about 6 months later, with what I believe is a solid workflow. So if you’re using EX-1 (or XDCam footage of any kind) you can learn from our mistakes and start off on the right foot.

In The Field

If you’re new to using a tapeless format, it can be very unnerving to spend an entire day shooting and have no tape to show for. To avoid disaster, redundancy is the key.

A simple but important note – label your media cards!!! Use a sharpie or a nice printed label, but make sure each card has a unique name/number. This will avoid confusion in the field when you drop your cards into a pile of other cards and don’t know which ones have footage to download and which are empty. Seriously, this one little step can save you in the field.

Assuming you don’t have enough SxS cards to make it through an entire day of shooting, you’re going to have to offload the cards and erase them in the field so that they can be reused (see, you’re already freaking out). Here’s how we handle that task.

In addition to the producer, camera person and possible audio guy, it’s ideal to have a AP or junior tech person with you. The handling of the media cards is very important, and getting it wrong can be disastrous. Don’t underestimate how important this is, just because it’s easy. We call this person the Media Assistant (MA from here forward).

The MA has the job of offloading all cards in the field, checking to be sure files were successfully transferred, and then erasing the clips from the card so the card can be reused. The equipment used for this is a MacBook Pro and two portable FireWire or USB drives. You can do the same thing using the PC but we’re all Mac here so I’m unable to provide any details on that side of things.

As each card is filled by the cameraperson, it’s passed off to the MA. The MA will then load it into the Express 34 slot on the MBP and it will mount on the desktop as an external drive (make sure you have the proper drive installed on this machine so that the card will mount on the desktop properly). Then, using a program called Shotput EXPress, the media is copied, simultaneously, to two different external drives (you can do up to 3 different locations. While you can do this manually in the finder as well, Shotput EXPress makes it more automated and does a nice data verification as it copies everything over. It just adds another layer of security.

Once the media has been copied, Sony’s XDCam EX Clip Browser software is used to view the clips on the drives and verify that everything looks and sounds as it should. At this point we’re just spot checking a random sampling of clips. Once the MA is satisfied, the inserted SxS card is erased by selecting all clips and hitting the delete key (this is also done using the Clip Browser software). The card is then given back to the producer or camera person for use again.

Once the shoot is over and the producer is back at the office, the footage is all copied to 2 different full size (and less expensive) drives. One is used during the production of the project by the producers and editors, and the other is a backup, and is stored with the client. It’s essentially equivalent to the box of beta tapes the client would have received in the past. After the media is successfully copied to the larger drives, the mini-drives are erased and ready for the next shoot.

As a side note, don’t cheap out on your hard drives, especially the big ones that are the final destination for your camera originals. A good drive does not cost that much more then a cheap one. Just ask yourself how much your shot day is worth, and if you would be willing to pay to reshoot everything. I highly recommend buying drives from G-Technology. While they’re not the cheapest, they are backed up with the best warranty in the business, they run quite and most of all, cool. On the flip side, STAY AWAY FROM LACIE DRIVES! I can’t tell you the number of editors and clients who have horror stories about drive failures, myself included. We used to have a ton of them but sold them all on eBay just to avoid any additional disaster.

Preparing for the Edit

While the free Sony tools can be used to screen and prep for editing, we have opted to go the route of having a FCP work station for the producer. After doing it both ways, we feel this is the most efficient for both the producer and the editor. (We’re currently looking into setting up a FCP Server workstation to streamline this process even more).

At this point loading, logging and transferring footage is the same is using P2 footage. Using the Sony FCP Logging plugin outlined in a previous SuiteTake post, the footage is loaded into the Log & Transfer window and clips are marked and labeled. As each clip is identified, it’s added to the import cue and converted to QT movies that FCP can edit with. The files you end up are basically MPEG-2 files wrapped into a .mov file. (For faster logging, check out our post on log and capture shortcuts.)

While going through this process, the producer can import multiple clips from a single recorded clip, add clip names and log notes, and organize footage into multiple bins as desired. This is all typically done to a drive designated as the “project drive”, so what you end up with is a single drive that has the FCP logging project with all of the bins and clips, and all of the transferred and transcoded media. This is what is handed off to the editor at the start of the edit.

Once the editor receives the drive, the project file that the producer created is opened, and all bins/clips are copied and pasted into the current working project (or the template project if we’re starting one from scratch). The project the producer creates is treated as a log project only, we do not edit inside that project.

With the new bins/clips pasted into the working project, we then use media manager to move all of the logged footage to our local edit drives and re-link them. We never work off of client drives, and instead opt to always have the footage on our own system. Since we have dedicated raid systems on each edit system, it’s a lot faster and it’s easier to keep things organized on our end. Once everything is copied over and re-linked we eject the drive and give it back to the producer.

Editing

So the main drawback to editing with the XDCam/EX-1 footage is that it’s saved in the MPEG-2 format. Because it’s a long GOP format, there’s not actually a full frame of video for each recorded frame of video. So when editing, FCP has to recreate those missing frames. While on the fly editing it’s usually seamless, the moment you add a transition or anything else that requires editing FCP has to create these new frames (FCP Calls this “Conforming MPEG-2 Video”), and THEN render. It adds a whole new layer of processing and even on a fast machine it’s a slow process.

So, what to do? There are three basic options.

Transcode to ProRes
While logging and importing footage inside of the FCP Log & Transfer window, you don’t have the option to transcode the footage into any other format. However, once that the footage has been imported and wrapped into QT files, you do have the option to convert everything to ProRes using compressor. What you’ll end up with are iFrame based video files that look as good as the original, but are more “edit friendly”. You’ll be able to edit quickly in a ProRes sequence with minimal rendering, and be able to do compositing without watching the image degrade right in front of your eyes. The drawback is you’re adding another step to your process, and depending on the amount of footage you have and the speed of your machine, it can be a very timely step.

Edit Natively in the XDCam EX MPEG-2 Format
For some very simple and short projects, this is actually a good option. Just drag your first shot into the timeline and let FCP match the timeline to your raw footage, and everything will play and edit in real time and you’ll be pretty happy with how it all comes together. But there’s one trick to make it go smoothly.

After you’ve let FCP match the sequence settings to you footage, open up the settings for your sequence and go to the “Render Control” tab. Make sure all rendering is done to ProRes instead of Same as Sequence. This way whenever you do need to render it will take less time and you won’t be compressing back into the MPEG-2 format. This essentially removes the conforming step that FCP would otherwise need to perform, at least while editing.

Exporting your final sequence will go slower then you might be used to, but it’s usually tolerable unless your project is very complex with lots of effects/render files. Because you’re exporting back into the XDCam EX format, it has to convert everything back into the Long GOP MPEG-2 format, which is very slow even on a fast machine.

Edit in a ProRes Timeline
You can also setup your timeline as a ProRes timeline for whatever frame size/frame rate matches your source footage. Once you do this, you can edit with your footage and for the most part play it back in real time (except for some effects) with FCP’s RT timeline. The advantage to working in this way is that since you’re working in the ProRes codec, your footage will continue to look great even if you throw lots of layers, graphics and effects at your project.

The huge down side to this is everything, and I mean EVERY-THING must be rendered at one point or another. Even if you’re able to play things back in real time while you’re editing using the RT features of FCP, when it comes time to print to tape or export a master QT file, you will have to render everything and it can take a very long time, even on shorter projects. You will end up with a very nice, high quality ProRes master file, but if you’re on a tight deadline this might not the way to go.

The Best Way?
After trying all of the above approaches on multiple projects, I don’t think this is a single solution that fits every project. I think before starting each project the best thing to do is look at the details of that project and decide. For simple projects that are short, mostly cuts and dissolves, few graphics and no real layers, staying in the MPEG-2 format is by far the fastest way to go. But if you have a more complicated project with layers, keys, graphics and so on, I would work in the ProRes world so that the image quality holds up though all of the processing.

At least for the majority of projects we do, transcoding everything to ProRes before we start is not really efficient. It takes too long and just adds an extra step that we just don’t have the time for. So in my opinion the it’s just not worth the time penalty.

The SuiteTake Take?
The EX-1/EX-3 and the higher end XDCam cameras have all proven that you can create some great images and record them to the MPEG-2 format. MPEG-2 cameras have really matured over the years, and they’re far superior to the baby brother HDV format cameras.

But understand that if you go this route there are tradeoffs when you get to the postproduction stage. The tradeoffs are not nearly as bad as they used to be and there are now multiple ways to handle the challenges – but they are still tradeoffs.

When starting any project, you should always consider the entire work flow start to end before shooting your first frame of video. If after doing this the EX-1/EX-3 fit your production needs, I say go for it.

While I don’t freelance as much as I used to, instead opting to edit at my own office, on the occasion I do I’m almost always shocked at how many editors don’t have good organization skills. While some might argue that it’s just part of being creative, I would disagree. With a little pre-planning and extra thought up front, all of your projects can be more organized and efficient. In this post I’ll talk about 2 ways that we keep things organized at Edit Creations and even include a template folder that you can download and modify for your own needs.

One thing I’ve learned over the years is that you should always approach your projects in a way that would allow any other editor to step in and take over should that be necessary. Maybe you need to call in sick and the project must go on, maybe you change jobs, or maybe you get hit by a bus walking to lunch (not likely, but I’m just saying…). The point is, don’t just think of yourself, think about how you might help the next editor down the line, not to mention the producer.

With today’s projects being based almost entirely on electronic elements, one place that things can get messy is your hard drive. Throwing QT movies, photoshop files, scripts, aftereffects renders and everything else into a single folder can easily get overwhelming. Even worse, what if they’re not in a single folder but instead all over multiple hard drives and the local network!

Add in the factor of working in a multi-user environment and it makes even more sense. At Edit Creations we have 3 rooms that all share the same media and same files. There are times when more then one room will be working on the same project, and that would be nearly impossible without some simple rules and guidelines in place.

But enough talking about it, let’s take a look at a template project folder.The folder shown below is the template that we use for every job. New jobs are assigned a job number and title that stays with the project all the way through. The template folder is copied into the active projects folder and renamed to reflect the project name.

As you can see, there are pre-made folders for all of the different assets that most jobs need. Not every folder is used on every job, but every every possible asset has a home. So when it comes time to save or open any type of file, there is only one (maybe two) places it can be.

And receiving elements from the producer is a snap as well. If the producer hands you a memory stick with photos, VO and a script on it, it’s pretty easy to figure out where to put each of them. And while you could create these folders as you go, it saves time and preserves consistency by having the same folder set for each project/editor.

In our project folder, all of the projects come together nicely.

Here is another benefit to consider. When the project is done, approved and in the can – it is very easy to backup the project and all of its assets (excluding captured media, which we don’t save as part of the project) to a DVD, HD or LTO tape. We always do a full resolution QT export of all final edited pieces (that go into the FCP Export folder) and what we end up with is a nice tidy package of files that can easily be backed up for future use.

Another great benefit to using the project number system is removing all elements related to a project. My normal procedure to remove a project once it’s safely backed up, is to search all media drives locally and on the network for the job number. This finds the project folder, render files, captured media, auto-save vault files, and anything else tied to that number. From the find window, I then do a select all and delete everything. Couldn’t be easier.

But let’s take it one step further. The project folder is great, but how about organizing your FCP project file and have that as part of the folder? I found I was always creating the same folders over and over again. While it doesn’t take that much time, it does add up over the years.

Take a look at this FCP project. This is how every job starts out, and again, has many pre-made folders to get started.

Also notice the very top folder in the project.

Long gone are the days of one video format fits all. The simple days of everything being on BetaSP and working in NTSC are gone for good. Our jobs range from DVCPro to full resolution 1080p uncompressed HD (we’re still waiting for our first RED project). So every project has to be setup properly based on the project needs. Even if the project was shot in HD, we don’t always edit in HD, it all depends on what the final project needs are. One way we communicate this to each other (and as a reminder to ourselves) is to rename that top folder with the project specific settings. Then if you open the project to do some work you just run the associated Easy Setup to set the edit system up properly.

Once a year (usually around this time) I go through both the project template folder as well as the FCP template project and make minor changes as I see fit. If you would like to give it a try, below is the link to our current template folder.

SuiteTake.com_Jobs Template_Folder.zip

If you’re interested in more tips on keeping your projects organized, shoot me an email.

Believe it or not the built-in tools in iTunes can be useful in a Final Cut Pro working environment. In this quick video tutorial I’ll show you some hidden features in iTunes that can help you maximize your efficiency and better your organization when importing music tracks into FCP projects.

With more and more media being shot and delievered these days with tapeless media formats such as Panasonic’s P2 and Sony’s SxS, efficency with Final Cut Pro’s Log and Transfer tool is more valuable than ever.

In this video tutorial I’ll show you how to log and transfer all of your tapeless media using only keyboard shortcuts. Once your clips are loaded into the Log and Transfer window you’ll be able to log the entire batch without touching the mouse once. 

Sony recently released version 1.0 of their log and transfer plugin that works with both XDCam and the newer SxS solid state media cameras like the EX-1 and EX-3. 

Installation is very simple, and no restart is required except for relaunching Final Cut Pro. When you open the Log and Transfer tool, you won’t find anything visibly different, but when you select XDCam media, either from a hard drive or directly from a SxS card, the footage now loads, and you can log and transfer the same way that you can P2 footage. 

In limited testing, we have found it to work as expected. The only downside is that you can’t transcode the footage into another format during import. This would be a helpful feature since editing in the XDCam format less then ideal. But for now, we’re pretty excited to see Sony improving the workflow and look forward to future upgrades. 

You can find more information by visiting Sony. 

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