Consolidating Professional Disc footage
 

What is the best way to consolidate raw footage?

Say you've shot a couple discs of raw, and you realize a couple clips would be good to keep for stock footage once your current project is done, but you don't want to waste a few full Professional Discs to store these little clips on, scattered around on them. You want to put them on a dedicated stock footage Professional Disc.

So what would be the best way to get them on a new Professional Disc? Does the PDZ-1 software have a way to do this? Or just use the "Write file to disc" in my XDCAM Explorer in Vegas Pro 8? I realize one would need to copy the files in question onto your computer's hard drive first. And I realize I need to do this using my camera till the U1 writing firmware update comes out.

When you choose one of these "official" methods of writing the clips to a new disc, does the PDZ-1 software and/or the Vegas Pro 8 XDCAM Explorer software bring all the meta data and proxies along as well?

Thanks.

you simply copy them (XDCAM files) to the disk in the camera using fam mode and using an explorer window.

But that would only bring the full res files and none of the metadata correct?

I guess that's not a problem, but I was just looking for a way that brought everything with it.

In writing back to the disk from the software, either by F70 deck or F350 camera, we have had major pixelization issues -- issues we weren't aware of in the beginning, and have lost footage because of it.

At this point we keep stock footage on a hard drive. A TB should hold about 48 hours, if you leave 20% of the disk space free. Bare SATA drives are $250... by my calculations, we're saving money putting them on HD instead of disc, no risk of Bad Things (tm) happening, no loss of EXIF data, and when you need them... plug in the drive and you're ready to edit immediately.

When I export back to the disc from FCP in full res, the camera generates a proxy clip to match it.

-gb-

Ah, OK, cool, didn't know it would regenerate the proxies.

And yeah, hard drives are a good option, but honestly I've been burned by hard drives failing in the past, so I'd like to think that the Professional Disc is a more reliable storage medium.

But if I do this, I will definitely test the footage before deleting the original, thanks for the warning.

The professional disks are $20 (ish) a piece, and hold 60 (ish) minutes of 35mbit HD. (I realize I undercut both of those, but I like round numbers.) That's $0.33/min.

A 500GB HD is $100, and holds 2880 minutes of 35mbit HD. That's $0.03/min.

By these numbers, you could RAID 1 your 500GB disks, plus keep an offline backup, which would triple your costs, and only be at $0.10/min... a third the cost of keeping them on XDCamHD, with a failure rate approaching zero. And be able to access anything you've ever shot, anytime.

I'm not arguing this to be argumentative, but to clarify and understand. This is how I do things, and I'm the only one I know who does it this way. I just want to know if I'm on the cutting edge, or if I just don't understand the potential problems with this system.

same when I drag and drop MXF files directly to the CLIP folder from the (Mac) Finder