Archiving my projects?
 

Hey all-
I was wondering what I could do to archive my Final Cut Express HD files. I know a lot of you probably don't use FCEHD, so whatever you do for FCP can probably be done in FCE as well. I do weddings from time to time and I also have other videos that I would like to keep, but not keep on my hard drive. I would like to be able to burn the footage to a DVD for archive. What file format should I use? What preferences should I use for the export? Can anyone give me some pointers?
Thanks.

If you are achiving all of your footage, you're not going to be able to fit a whole lot on DVDs. Plus the process of burning and later accessing the files is pretty slow. You might want to look into a hard disk solution. I bought a Wiebetech ComboDock and some CompUSA branded Maxtor drives($80/200 GB) for this purpose and so far it has worked out pretty well.

http://www.wiebetech.com/products/ComboDock.php

They also have some other interesting products such as tray loading hard drive enclosures and such.

Cannon raises some good points. If you want to maintain full quality then you would have to export your video at full quality. I use FCP, but assuming FCE is similar you would open the desired sequence and choose File > Export > Quicktime Movie > Current Settings. That will only give you around 20 minutes on a DVD, and Cannon summarizes the other downside to that. If you burn MPEG2 on the DVD you'll lose a lot of quality and it will be a pain to recompress as DV. Personally I don't think DVD's are viable for anything you might want to edit again later.

I also use hard drives for backup, but just regular firewire 400 externals. I've got six filled with video, and a couple other slower ones for other stuff. But this gets expensive, and I end up erasing them periodically to store work in progress that I don't have time to finish.

So honestly I think the only practical solution at the current time is to copy the stuff back to DV tape, which is cheap. When I have a final edit that I'm happy with and I'm ready to call something "done" I do a "Print to Tape" and record it back to my camera via firewire.

I agree that a video DVD is the next best thing to worthless for archiving a project master. A data DVD with video files is OK but holds very little, especially if you shoot Beta SP which runs about 100 gigs/hr.

What we do is save the FCP Capture Scratch folders and project files to external FW 400 drives. Don't worry about the render folders because the project can be re-rendered if needed. This way we can restore a project and make extensive edits if needed. We also keep a Final Cut movie master of a project for printing to tape or DVD authoring. Actually I also keep an .ac3 and .m2v file of each FCP master for DVD authoring.

Boyd, thanks for posting this info. I have been wondering what I should do to keep HD space open on my ibook and this sounds like what I need to do. Have you ever done this then recaptured your project back into Final Cut? Was the quality still there?

Thanks!

See this thread for more responses on this query.

Data DVD is by far the least expensive (< $0.20/GB) and most durable method for long-time archival of video projects. My preferred method is to RAR up my project into appropriately sized chunks and burn them to two (or more) sets of DVDs so that there's some redundancy to the backup.

Naturally, if any of the DV goes through a re-encode, there is going to be some generation loss with a repeated print-to-tape/restore-from-tape archiving method, but more significantly, this method doesn't allow you to save your editing decisions losslessly. You'll never be able to go back and tweak a video or audio filter just-so once you've deleted your source material and your original project files.

There should be no quality issues because you're staying digital all the way and not recompressing anything (just use the project's native format). Yes, I have recaptured stuff I've archived to DV tape and it was fine.

Boyd,

I'm running into a problem trying to print to video to my gl2. I have my gl2 hooked up through my ibook's firewire port. I choose print to video in FCE and for some reason my gl2 just sits there. I push record on my gl2, but the monitor screen is black. I tried turning my gl2 off and back to vcr mode and for several seconds I could see my project on the lcd screen, but it went right to black.

Can you help me figure out what I may be doing wrong?
Thanks!

Unfortunately people with Canon camcorders seem to have this problem a lot. On an iBook you don't have any options really since there's no PC card slot and only one firewire port.

Is your project on an external or internal drive? Also, Print to Video has lots of "issues." I had to result to tricks just a couple days ago to get it to print without dropping frames on my dual G5/2.5 and a Sony DVD recorder.

Do you have problems capturing with this camera? Or is it just printing to video? Have you recently upgraded to Tiger or QT7? These can also cause problems. If so, then see the following:

http://docs.info.apple.com/article.html?artnum=301852

I'm using the internal drive on my ibook. I have no problems at all capturing with my gl2 to this ibook. I'm running OS 10.4.2....

Robert,

Could you walk me through what I need to do to make a copy of my project to dvd....this is different than exporting it to idvd, right?!?!

Can I make a backup on dvd, then remove all files and folders on my HD, and then reinstall my project through the dvd backup?!

I am using FCE 1.0.1 and ilife 5 if that helps any...

Thanks!

My guess is that you are always going to have problems with print to video dropping frames if using a slow iBook drive. However, you shouldn't just get a black screen. I don't use FCE, so not sure what might be different from FCP. Check your device control settings for starters, the computer and camera may not be talking to each other.

I clicked over to capture to see if I could control my camera throuh FCE...that worked fine.

When I click on view>video> do I need to select real-time or firewire? Firewire is currently set....

It's a strange problem I'm having with this print to video command....sometimes if I click my gl2 to off then back to vcr, I can see video from my ibook playing, but it clicks to black after a few seconds.

Ok!

I went to Ken Stone's site and I found a very easy step by step guide to making copies of my unprotected dvds:

http://www.kenstone.net/fcp_homepage...vd_copies.html

I highly recommend it to anyone like me who had no clue on how to make dvd copies of their films/projects!!!

I checked the quality by putting the new copy dvd into my dvd player and it looked great....

:)

Dennis: My walkthrough would only be relevant to Windows users since I use WinRAR, but you can get RAR software for any OS. My settings: I use archive format RAR, compression method Best, and set my split to volume size to 666,594,743 bytes. Having selected all the files in my project (and assuming I have at least as much space again on my hard drive), I RAR them all up and then they get RAR-compressed to as many files as necessary. I then burn these files to DVDs using the Data DVD software that came with my burner (Roxio Easy CD Creator--but again, you probably already have your favorite DataDVD burning software for your particular OS).

Thanks for the info Robert!

I shoot shorts that are no longer than 8 or 9 minutes when finished. By using my disk utility, I can make quick copies of my finished dvd if I need more copies in the future. My concern was keeping space free on my HD for incoming projects. So I wanted a way to remove all traces of a finished project before starting a new one.

I'm really learning as I go (Aren't we all though!). I thought I had this all figured out when I bought an external HD to use as my scratch disk.....but I did not realize the external drive needed to be firewire. I bought the cheaper USB drive. I actually was able to move my video to the USB external drive, but the audio was out of sync pretty bad and I'm not even mentioning the dropped frames.

I have not experienced any dropped frames so far by using my ibook's internal hard drive....

The print to tape option looked good to, but I can't do that for some reason. Thank goodness I don't have any problems when capturing footage.

:)

Using the internal drive is usually a bad idea, but if it works for you then that's fine. Over time I think you'll have problems. A 4200 RPM drive is really pretty slow, most people feel you need 7200 RPM drives. In terms of external firewire drives, I couldn't get a 5600 RPM disk to work reliably.

But there are several other issues with the internal drive:

1. The operating system itself and your applications needs to read and write from the drive constantly. This can interfere with the constant high data throughput which DV requires during playback and capture.

2. Even a brand new Mac already has thousands of small files on the internal drive. Unix likes to create tons of these things, like temp files and log files. They are periodically cleaned up by the operating system. In all your other applications you'll also create a lot of smaller files. Over time these will cause your disk to become fragmented. DV wants big empty disks with a small number of huge files. A fragmented disk isn't very compatible with this. So even if everything works fine now, you will probably gradually find performance problems as your disk gets more fragmented.

Beyond all this, another philosophy is certainly "if it ain't broke don't fix it," so if your current setup does what you need then that's fine. Just keep some of these things in mind for the future in case you start having problems.

Boyd,

You bring up a lot of good points that I have wondered about. I had an emac that was running FCE and I started to get some performance issues there after a while....

Is there a way to "clean up" my ibook to keep it running tight after I remove a project?!?! I went into FCE documents and opend up the cache, autosave, all of the folders there and deleted the documents inside.

My ibook came with a 60gig HD and I only use it for FCE projects, and loading cds into itunes for my ipod. I do use photoshop elements 2, but I have that installed on an external drive.

So, should I plan on reformatting my ibook's internal HD annually and reinstalling FCE?!? That seems extreme, but if it will keep things going for me....

:)

Like I said, most people consider it a bad idea to use the internal drive for video, but "your mileage may vary." Using iTunes on the same drive is even a worse idea in terms of fragmentation I think.

There are programs which attempt to defrag your disk. I think DiskWarrior can do this (you should have a copy handy for emergencies anyway), although I've only used it for salvaging a bad drive.

Personally, I wouldn't use any of these programs on my internal drive either. It's just one more risk of corrupting the drive - for example if you have a crash during defragmentation you could lose everything.

There is also some concern (possibly unfounded) that DV puts a lot of stress on a drive, which isn't a great idea on an internal.