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Save early, save often
The following is not so much vidding advice as general video editing advice. These were taught to me as good practices for ensuring that no matter what wacky thing you do to your project, you have back-ups.
Caveat: I work in Final Cut Pro; to my understanding Avid and Premiere run on similar principles, but all my menu/keystroke instructions will be for FCP.
Background explanation of how Final Cut files work: a FCP project file does not contain any media. If you capture media via Final Cut, Final Cut will make a folder somewhere to store it (on whatever you have set as the scratch disk, which you can do in Menu: Final Cut Pro > System Settings > tab: Scratch Disks). (Capturing media is something that is probably only relevant to you if your source is on VHS and you are digitizing it. If you are working in digital files, you probably did not capture them, you imported them. My preferred method of importing media files is drag-and-drop from the Finder to an appropriately named bin in the Browser window.) But the project file itself contains no media, only pointers to media.
This has several implications. They include:
Related to this last point, Final Cut makes regular back-ups of your project file. You can set how often and how many copies it keeps in Menu: Final Cut Pro > User Preferences > tab: General, in the bottom left of the dialogue box, "Autosave Vault settings." Mine is set to save every half hour, and keep forty copies, so the last twenty hours of my work are backed up in this manner. (Also on that dialogue box, top left, is Levels of Undo. Mine is set to the max, which is 99. Everyone: apple-Z is your friend. If you've done something and you can't figure out what but everything on your timeline moved, omg, hit apple-Z until it's back before it got screwed up.)
If you ever attempt to open a Final Cut project file and your computer tells you it is corrupted (this sometimes happens if Final Cut crashes on you), and the copy on your thumb drive isn't up to date (I'll admit it, I don't do that manual back-up as often as I should in vid farr), go back through copies in the Autosave Vault until you find one that's uncorrupted. Then promptly save it it a new location and use it as your primary project file. The Autosave Vault is a folder kept on your scratch disk (again, to set your scratch disk, use Menu: Final Cut Pro > System Settings > tab: Scratch Disks).
Because of the Autosave function, it is wise to save and name your project before you do anything else. Well, in general that's a good idea, but the Autosave Function means that if you don't save and name your file first thing, you will end up with a bunch of project back-ups named Untitled, which is singularly unhelpful.
It is also a good practice to back up sequences within a project. I was taught to make a bin in every project entitled "Archive sequences" and every time I took a food break, sleep break, fic break, whatever, make a copy of the sequence I was working on and put the copy in the archive bin. To do this: in the Browser window, ctrl-click the sequence you have been working and select "Duplicate." If your sequence is named, for instance, "PiscoBandito," a new sequence will appear in the Browswer named "PiscoBandito Copy." Rename the copy with a date/time string (or whatever identifier works best for you--date/time string is really ingrained with me; I just renamed my copy "PiscoBandito 201002070459") and drag-and-drop this duplicate sequence to your archive bin. (In addition to doing this whenever I am going to walk away from Final Cut, I also do this if I want to try a section a couple of different ways and have record of the experiments to decide between.) If you keep up with this practice, you will have a record of your work spanning the entirety of the project, not just the last however many hours in Autosave Vault. If you suspect some clips have subtly moved down the timeline when you weren't looking, you can look in your project archive bin and compare.
And of course, save early, save often. Don't rely on the Autosave Vault--if you get in the groove, a lot can happen in half an hour. I practically do it once a minute. Drop clip on timeline, apple-S, apple-R, that's me.
That's all I know about backing up your project files and sequences. I was thinking of doing another entry about my workflow, which of course is not the only way to do it but hey, I might know a few useful tricks?
Let me know if you've got any questions, about this entry or about Final Cut in general.
Caveat: I work in Final Cut Pro; to my understanding Avid and Premiere run on similar principles, but all my menu/keystroke instructions will be for FCP.
Background explanation of how Final Cut files work: a FCP project file does not contain any media. If you capture media via Final Cut, Final Cut will make a folder somewhere to store it (on whatever you have set as the scratch disk, which you can do in Menu: Final Cut Pro > System Settings > tab: Scratch Disks). (Capturing media is something that is probably only relevant to you if your source is on VHS and you are digitizing it. If you are working in digital files, you probably did not capture them, you imported them. My preferred method of importing media files is drag-and-drop from the Finder to an appropriately named bin in the Browser window.) But the project file itself contains no media, only pointers to media.
This has several implications. They include:
- If you ever reorganize or rename media files and then subsequently open Final Cut to vid, Final Cut will say OH NO WHERE IS THE MEDIA. Don't check "forget files" in this circumstance (I honestly don't know why that option is offered, jfc), instead use the "Reconnect Files" dialogue box. (You can also ctrl-click on the slashed-through icons of offline media files to get to the "Reconnect Files" dialogue box.)
- If you are using a set of media files that is in some way standardized (a direct rip of the .vob files off a DVD or a common season pack from the webs) and something catastrophic happens to the drive you store media on and you lose the files, you can re-acquire them and tell Final Cut "here they are! Reconnect!"
- Conversely, if you make unique, custom media files like short .dv clips of just the bits you plan to use--if catastrophic drive failure wipes those out, you are kind of screwed. Which is why I emphatically do not recommend pre-clipping in another program. I know a lot of people do this so that they have clips in a codec/format that when they drop them on the timeline, they do not have to render. If you work in the standardized, reacquirable files like .avi or .vob sources in Final Cut, you will always have to render clips when you put them on the timeline because their compression does not lend itself to being chopped in bits. But I find hitting apple-R every time I drop a clip on the timeline not that big a deal, compared to file recoverability.
- This is slightly outside the realm of making sure you're backed up, but an interesting use of the way Final Cut is set up: if you upgrade your files, say, you're remastering from tvrips to dvdrips, you can ctrl-click media files in the Browser to make them offline, and then reconnect them to new files. This is rarely if ever a painless process, starting with FCP will complain if any aspects of the file are different (frame size, frame rate, length, aspect ratio, etc) and ending with any timing differences, such as imperfect commercial cut in tvrip different from dvdrip, will mean twiddling all your clips to correct. But this definitely cuts down the clip-hunting stage of remastering, and is a very good reason to hold onto your old project files if you think you might remaster.
- The FCP project file is usually a few hundred KB or a couple of MB, not hundreds or thousands of megs of media. The largest FCP project file I have ever caused is 6.7MB. This is small enough to back up on a thumb drive. And you should. If you make sure all your media files are either re-rippable or re-downloadable, the project file is the only unique thing you have to protect.
Related to this last point, Final Cut makes regular back-ups of your project file. You can set how often and how many copies it keeps in Menu: Final Cut Pro > User Preferences > tab: General, in the bottom left of the dialogue box, "Autosave Vault settings." Mine is set to save every half hour, and keep forty copies, so the last twenty hours of my work are backed up in this manner. (Also on that dialogue box, top left, is Levels of Undo. Mine is set to the max, which is 99. Everyone: apple-Z is your friend. If you've done something and you can't figure out what but everything on your timeline moved, omg, hit apple-Z until it's back before it got screwed up.)
If you ever attempt to open a Final Cut project file and your computer tells you it is corrupted (this sometimes happens if Final Cut crashes on you), and the copy on your thumb drive isn't up to date (I'll admit it, I don't do that manual back-up as often as I should in vid farr), go back through copies in the Autosave Vault until you find one that's uncorrupted. Then promptly save it it a new location and use it as your primary project file. The Autosave Vault is a folder kept on your scratch disk (again, to set your scratch disk, use Menu: Final Cut Pro > System Settings > tab: Scratch Disks).
Because of the Autosave function, it is wise to save and name your project before you do anything else. Well, in general that's a good idea, but the Autosave Function means that if you don't save and name your file first thing, you will end up with a bunch of project back-ups named Untitled, which is singularly unhelpful.
It is also a good practice to back up sequences within a project. I was taught to make a bin in every project entitled "Archive sequences" and every time I took a food break, sleep break, fic break, whatever, make a copy of the sequence I was working on and put the copy in the archive bin. To do this: in the Browser window, ctrl-click the sequence you have been working and select "Duplicate." If your sequence is named, for instance, "PiscoBandito," a new sequence will appear in the Browswer named "PiscoBandito Copy." Rename the copy with a date/time string (or whatever identifier works best for you--date/time string is really ingrained with me; I just renamed my copy "PiscoBandito 201002070459") and drag-and-drop this duplicate sequence to your archive bin. (In addition to doing this whenever I am going to walk away from Final Cut, I also do this if I want to try a section a couple of different ways and have record of the experiments to decide between.) If you keep up with this practice, you will have a record of your work spanning the entirety of the project, not just the last however many hours in Autosave Vault. If you suspect some clips have subtly moved down the timeline when you weren't looking, you can look in your project archive bin and compare.
And of course, save early, save often. Don't rely on the Autosave Vault--if you get in the groove, a lot can happen in half an hour. I practically do it once a minute. Drop clip on timeline, apple-S, apple-R, that's me.
That's all I know about backing up your project files and sequences. I was thinking of doing another entry about my workflow, which of course is not the only way to do it but hey, I might know a few useful tricks?
Let me know if you've got any questions, about this entry or about Final Cut in general.
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One thing I do that you don't mention here is to export a draft of the vid after each editing session and save it to multiple drives and/or on a CD or DVD. That way if the project and/or clips go boom, I have a draft to refer to when rebuilding.
Anyway, this is really helpful info. Would you consider dropping a link to it on
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Huh. I don't remember having that issue... *opens up sg1 vid, which was the last time she used .vobs* It seems like the scrub okay to me. We are talking about 'drag the playhead around, watch what happens'? Scrub is not something I do much, I prefer to watch at 4x or 8x, so it's possible some feature is missing that I don't care about. Describe the problem in more detail, please, so we can determine if it's one I've been ignoring or one I might have a solution for!
One thing I do that you don't mention here is to export a draft of the vid after each editing session
Huh, that wouldn't have occurred to me, I probably only export about five drafts over the course of a vid at points I want to show them to betas.
Would you consider dropping a link to it on mac_vidding_101
(Not a valid dw comm? I was totally excited there for a second *laugh* Did you mean
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Yep, that's what I mean. When I have a whole vob in FCP, I need to scrub to find the clips I'm looking for (I have no idea how you locate clips in a vob without scrubbing! Tell me!). When I try to do that, the vob goes out of sequence and/or gets stuck at a particular frame and refuses to move. I've also had many instances where I mark the in and out points and drag the clip to my timeline only to discover that the in and out I selected in the viewer are not those that play back in the canvas. That was when I gave up bringing vobs into FCP and went back to clipping with MPEG Streamclip.
And yes, I meant the LJ comm -- AFAIK it's not mirrored on DW. I'll go ahead and drop a link there if you're not going to. (:
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Um, lessee... when you rip vobs, do you fix timecode? Because one of the anti-piracy things on most dvds is broken timecode. I use MPEGStreamclip for that--one of the very few pre-processing things I do.
Other than that, I cannot guess. Some dvds are nastier than others to rip. I never did get a copy of the Stargate movie that let me poke at the middle fifty minutes or so.
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This could change my entire process. I'm curious whether it would work for me not to have the whole reviewing/clipping experience I'm used to. Hmm...
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Well, I've had very mixed results vidding m2vs. With some DVDs, it worked like a charm; with others, FCP kept crashing and I finally gave up.
Vobs have never worked for me, for the reasons I mentioned.
What version of FCP are you running?
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I'm thinking about going to 7 since it seems very shiny, but I'm not sure I can afford it right now.
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We run into similar situations at work all. The. Time.
Fortunately, as we have people saving to a shared network store, we have both the 'shadow copy' functionality built into Active Directory, the SAN's own built shapshot copy functionality, AND daily backups (both near term storage and offsite tape).
About the only time we've had to pull tapes is when some clueless doofus tells us 'I'm missing these emails, the last time I recall seeing then was x months ago' which makes the mail admin (i.e. ME) a sad panda.
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(Btw, do you cross-post to LJ? I'm tracking your DW, but it's more convenient for me to just friend on LJ, if that's okay.)
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If I had more storage, I probably wouldn't have this problem. Y/Y?
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Not entirely relatedly, I just added you on LJ because I read my flist there much more regularly (I am ladyofthelog).