Best practice for moving clips from SD to hard drive

[David Potter]

Hi
New owner of FS5. What do people consider best practice for getting files from the memory card to the computer? I've seen people copying the entire 'PRIVATE' folder over. Is that really necessary or can I just copy over the .mxf and .xml files?
Thanks in advance
David

[Donald McPherson]

Just copy the whole SD. The size of the files I don't need are so small compared to the movie files anyway.
You never know when you might need them.

[David Potter]

Thanks Donald.

Do you know what all the other files actually do? What would I be losing if I just copied the .mxf and .xml?

For years I've organised footage in a folder structure of <Project Title>/Media/Video and then the clips. Don't want to add another 3 or 4 subfolders unless it will actually impact on the footage.

[Nate Haustein]

David, it really depends. Some NLEs could care less if you just dump the MXF files themselves right into the timeline, while others aren't even going to look at the files without the full card structure.

If you're shooting for a client and handing off the footage, keep the ENTIRE structure intact. However if it's only you using the footage, feel free to experiment and find what works for you, especially for short-term projects. For example, I use FCPX and utilize a process to import the clips as follows:

1. Import from card to a FCPX "temp" library (this re-wraps the MXF to .MOV files)
2. Rename all the files in the "temp" library as "PROJ_2018.05.05_EVENT_001.mov"
3. Copy all the files from the "temp" library to either a folder on our server, or into another working project library.

I like this system as the files become viewable in the finder directly, and every clip is organized by client, date, event and clip number. There are only so many "MVI_00001.MOV" titles you can handle before going insane!

HOWEVER, I would not use that system to deliver content directly to a client, as the possibility of their NLE to read a re-wrapped XAVC-L .MOV file is questionable.

[Dave Sperling]

Remember,
ALWAYS MAKE MULTIPLE COPIES!!!

Thinking logically ---
OK, you've copied your card to a hard drive. That means you have a backup, right? Well, the backup should have everything on it that the cards have, or it's not a backup.
But if you reformat your card to use again, your hard drive is now the 'original' and you don't have a backup any more. And as we all know, hard drives fail.
So you absolutely need to make two copies from your card to two different hard drives - so you will have a backup.

So if you're trying to make things 'easier' by only copying/using certain files, don't do this on your original or your backup. You can do this on a THIRD drive (which would preferably be an SSD or RAID/SSD) that you will use as your editing source. Then you still have an 'Original' and a 'Backup' of your data.

Also, make sure you have a good organization system in place for all your data originals and backups, and preferably keep originals and backups in completely different locations.

I organize by Client / (end-client) / production / date / Camera / card number

I normally keep separate hard drives for each client and/or sub-client. In certain cases a single production gets its own hard drive(s).

Yes, it's a lot to manage, but when you get that call two years later from a client whose hard drive died (or who managed to miss-place it) it's a lot better to be able to save them than to say 'I told you to make backups'

[David Potter]

Thanks for the replies.

Yes, backup system is in place with 3 copies of everything. I've downloaded Sony's Catalyst Browse software and I'm going to use that for copying files from card to hard drive. It brings across all of the subfolders etc so that's obviously what they recommend too.

[Cliff Totten]

You can download "TeraCopy" for Windows. It integrates itself into Windows copy function so when you copy, it will ask you if you want to use Windows copy or TeraCopy to do the copy.

The cool thing about TeraCopy is that it can do a full CRC source/destination verify after the copy is done. This gives you peice of mind that all those 0's and 1's stayed the same. It will list out a full copy report too with CRC match or error flags too.

Btw....from the best I have seen, XAVC metadata files that support each video clip appears to be 100% redundant with the metadata already stored inside each video file. In other words, it appears that each XAVC file is already loaded with any and all metadata that is necessary.

So, I don't know why Sony created a file and folder structure like they did for this. Maybe some NLE's couldnt read all the .mxf packed metadata.....so Sony gave then a secondary option of reading data from a redundant external file?? If an NLE was not .mxf aware and could not parse it to get the metadata, it always had a "backup" option. I always thought that the whole point of the .mxf container was to use its additional metata storage ability. So if an NLE is .MXF aware, it should be able to read all it's metadata?

I have asked this question so many times at NAB and have never gotten a perfect answer. I personally hate the h.264 long GOP implementation inside XAVC-L. It unpacks and decodes MUCH slower than h.264 XAVC-S in a standard .mp4 wrapper...even though the two h.264 implementations are virtually identical. (Only apparent difference is a fixed GOP cadence vs. an open/sliding GOP timing.) I have no need for timecode and I will take the same thing in an .MP4 wrapper ANY day! (I would love for XDCAM camcorders to give you the option of .mp4 or .mxf)

CT

[Gary Huff]

Originally Posted by Cliff Totten

You can download "TeraCopy" for Windows. It integrates itself into Windows copy function so when you copy, it will ask you if you want to use Windows copy or TeraCopy to do the copy.

That's pretty sweet, would be assume to have a Mac app that did something like that. I typically use Carbon Copy Cloner.