Having completed two films together, many members of the production team on these films have kind of become a studio family and the task now is to try to expand to include more and more people. I think many crew members went into the film, quite honestly unsure of what to expect but came out just wanting to do another one. Having asked a few people’s help with editing and now having finally synced all the production audio, I have the monumental task of shipping data left, right and centre attempting to facilitate an online edit workflow.
Online-Offline
Online-Offline is a technique for editing tape where you would have the high quality film print made at the end of the film based on the editing decisions made using tape media. In the digital age this isn’t strictly necessary when shooting with manageable files but because this film is so long it starts to get a little crazy. The film we’re working on has approximately 300GB of footage which is barely any considering the film is meant to run 22 minutes in length. The film was shot using terrible H.264 QuickTime files because no matter how hard we hacked the Nikon SLR we were shooting on, we couldn’t escape compression (even with an external recorder, we still wouldn’t have gained any quality improvements). So here we are attempting to have three editors editing simultaneously and, it’s very difficult. The reason online-offline comes into it is that we’re all trying to edit the same footage, keeping all the metadata intact across three project files and create a workflow where we can email each other project files and simply relink the footage to our own drives and go from there.
Server
After realising that we needed some more infrastructure, I grabbed an old netbook, an old router and a 1TB WD drive I had lying around and rigged it up to be used as an ftp server for the studio. This has opened the doors for a great backup solution but at the moment it requires constant refreshes as it doesn’t back up any of the file based metadata logged into the footage files.
Unfortunately there’s no real way to combat this.