housekeeping media ideas?

[Phil Gadd]

Hi Guys

Just waiting for my new iMac 27, i7, 68, with 1TB fusion drive so will hopefully stop the slow editing times on my current machine.

I have recently discovered that I should store all my events, projects and media on an external hard drive. At present am using 2 x 1tb firewire external drives BUT i should possibly go for a USB 3 or thunderbolt (bit pricey at present) going forward.

Quite quickly, I have realised the way I store media is not the best especially when i come to archive footage.

Anyone got any ideas on the best way to do this and stop me turning my drives into a 'spaghetti junction' mess?

[Dave Partington]

Phil there are lots of ways to store media ;)

Much depends on what you are shooting, how you shoot and what sort of organisation you're looking for.

Some people shoot an entire project start to finish, which makes it easy to organise.

Other people just go shoot a little bit of this and a little bit of that, in which case storing by year-month-day (in that order so it sorts properly) often works better.

Other people like to store by project name etc.

So, give us more idea of how / what you're shooting?

[Phil Gadd]

Thanks Dave

I can see your point, it's a bit of a vague request :-)

Ok, I shoot alone and edit alone, have done a few weddings, few charity golf days here and abroad, one very in depth 20 min film for the local housing trust (8 short films on how local funding has helped grous etc), few small business profile films..

Mixed bag really, but like my filing system.. Initially I started filing by clients/projects/camera..audio etc (I have 2 cameras for when I have tried multicam footage)

[Dave Partington]

Well.....

We've been through all sorts of schemes over the years. What we're currently running with more and more are disk images, which has the added benefit of keeping FCPX nice and clean, with only the current open disk images showing up in the Event Library. This helps to keep us sane (I hate more than one event open at any given time) and also speeds up FCPX opening and general operation.

The key for us was finding a great little utilities called "Create Disk Image" (see here : Film Tools - some stuff to work more effective). This does the usual stuff like creating disk images (just like you can do within the Disk Utilities in the OS) but also allows you to change the size of an image and also compact an image to make it as small as possible.

If you haven't worked with disk images before, they act just like connected hard disks. You double click the disk image to mount it (just like plugging a drive in) and you can eject it just like any other external HDD.

So, each project (sorry, Event!) gets it's own disc image (choose SPARSE!). We generally create the sparse disc image with around 1TB of space to allow it to grow as needed with render files (it only actually occupies as much space as needed, not the entire 1TB). Then, once the project is completed we will delete the render files, delete the proxy and/or optimised media folders and then compact the image (using the utility above) to make it as small as possible ready for archiving.

Disc images are then organised according to the Year (e.g. 2012, 2013), project type (Events, Weddings, Corporate etc) and then the project name. e.g.

2012
--- Corporate
-------Customer ABC
------------Project 123
------------Project 456
-------Customer DEF
------------Project 123
--- Events
------------Project 123
--- Weddings
------------ Bride & Groom ABC
------------ Bride & Groom DEF
2013
--- Corporate
-------Customer ABC

etc

Once projects are completed and no longer needed we archive to LTO tape, but you could just as easily 'backup' (note I didn't use the work archive) to other external HDDs or perhaps Blu-ray media.

I never consider HDDs archives as such because a hard disk sat on the shelf cannot be relied upon to still work next time you plug it in, and the longer you leave it on the shelf, the less likely it is to work next time. We've trashed somewhere in the region of 50-60 hard disks that no longer work due to time sat on the shelves.

[Phil Gadd]

Thanks Dave thats a very thorough response

Love the link to creat a disk image, wonderfully simple