I have a handful of clips in Final Cut rendering, and several others smoothcam'ing at the moment - so I thought I'd take a minute to post about some of the tools I'm using right now to stay organized, and fully backed-up.

I'm going to mainly talk about three apps: Hazel, Punakea, and SmartBackup - and no, sadly, I'm not being paid to write this :P

The first app I use to stay organized is Punakea, I've posted two videos in the past about this app - the first one being our very first 'weekly video update' (when I began importing the first hour of tape), and the second video was a time-lapse screen-capture of me logging the last several hours of footage.

Both these videos go into how I use the app to tag each video clip... like I would a flickr, or facebook picture - but these tags are indexed in your Mac's Spotlight, so you can search for them with any app.

I know that's not saying much on Punakea, but I wanted to just bring it up because it's part of the reason why I use SmartBackup. The way SBU works is different from CarbonCopyCloner or SuperDuper! in that it hides the backed-up files from indexing, while still keeping in perfect sync all the metadata I enter with Punakea.

This is extremely important because when I use Spotlight (or Punakea, or Final Cut) to search for a tag, like "Larry", or "Kettle Falls", the results aren't doubled up. It's got a super clean Mac-like interface and it tells you (where the blue arrow is pointing) exactly how many changes there have been to either the number of files on that drive, or changes to the metadata, color labels, *everything* is synced up.

Here's a screencap where I searched for a clip I needed: z1u_t008_c-9, the only results I get are the two SmoothCam reference files (the purple one is the one in my documents folder, I have Hazel label it that color automatically when it copies it), a SmartBackup LOG file (just so I know the raw video clip *has* been backed-up somewhere) and the video file itself. The other two (un-numbered) files are just render files from earlier today.

The last app, Hazel, is one that I could not work without. One of the most important files for me to keep track of, aside from the raw footage itself, is the SmoothCam reference files. This file, which has an "mtdf" extention, is usually no bigger (in file size) than an email, but some of these reference files can take 2 days to create. Loosing them is a huge, huge pain. So this is where Hazel comes in, Hazel monitors folders and then performs actions you set up.

So, for example, Final Cut does it's thing with SmoothCam on a clip in the timeline, let's say clip: fx1_t009_c-6 (this clip came from the Sony Fx1, it was the 9th tape from that camera, and the 6th cut on the tape), when FCP is finished it dumps the SmoothCam mtdf file where the clip source is with the same name as the video. So all these little files collect on external drives I have set up, and with SmartBackup they are synced weekly.

But by having Hazel monitor the two external drives for new mtdf files - it will automatically (within 30 seconds usually), in the background, copy that small file and dump it into a folder under my documents... doing this makes sure that the reference files are in 4 places at all times: the external-drive where the video clip is located, the mirrored USB drive, my documents folder, and the last one is on my Time Machine drive.


Okay. That's enough being a dork for tonight - I need to get back to editing now. Hopefully this helps *someone* out there and is not a total bore. I'm always happy to answer any questions people have about workflow or anything else.

Labels: Post-Production, Punakea