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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.
no subject
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...