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.

I should be upfront in saying that I’ve never gone to school for film making or editing, short of the two times I was allowed to sit in the back of the film class at Washtenaw Community College. Despite this, I’ve been lucky enough to have spent time editing for NBC’s “dot com” department, where I learned a lot about editing workflows. Reaching the conclusion that… they are out-dated. Very out-dated. Coming back from our road trip last summer, we had about 120+ hours of HDV footage, several rolls of 16mm film, and hundreds of individual Mp4 clips taken with several small hand held cameras. I realize that’s probably a bit larger in scale than most people reading this post might need to worry about. But what I love about my current workflow is that it holds up on both smaller projects and larger projects (so far). I knew the traditional way of logging and organizing would involve lots of comments and labels, and sub-clip bins. Perhaps some color-coding for interview footage, b-roll, and so on. Trying to make the most of a hierarchical order for months worth of footage seemed… a nightmare. So, I thought of how I organize the other media in my life, most of which, lives online. And came up with the following – the workflow I’ve been using the last few months, I’m about half way through importing my HD footage and so far, in the time it takes me to type out 3 or 4 key words, I’m able to find *everything* I’m looking for no matter where it’s stored. 1. Importing: The most important change in handling footage – is using tags as the main form of organization. But before I get into that; tagging your footage would not be possible (or at least as easy) if it weren’t for Final Cut 6’s ability (with the Sony HDV import setting) to break each cut on the tape into a separate independent movie file (you can also do this in iMovie). Also, if you were using one of the many impressive tapeless ACHDV cameras available (which is what I’d prefer to be using currently), you would, by default, be handling all your footage as individual clips. 2. Quicklook: One problem I knew I would run into was having Final Cut being tied up during the import process – it would essentially take me twice me the amount of time I had in footage to import and then later log it. So I started thinking about organizing with 3rd party apps’, but I also didn’t want to bog down my system resources by opening file after file in QuickTime just to take a look at it, enter Apple’s new Quicklook. By opening up my capture scratch folder, I can tap the spacebar and scrub through an entire clip in seconds. This might not work as well for editors who didn’t also shoot the footage they are working with – but in any case, it’s still fast, it doesn’t involve opening up a bunch of different files – just tap the spacebar, and instantly scrub through your clip. 3. Tagging: I tag my Flickr photos, my bookmarks on Del.icio.us, the music I love on Last.fm, basically everything. It’s how I’m used to organizing just about anything. This method works especially well in OS X; with spotlight and 3rd party app’s that take advantage of Apple’s ‘indexing’ and ‘comments’. Although OS X has a powerful built-in search and filter for Metadata, it’s still short on an easy and visual way of applying that info. Which is where Punakea comes in – Punakea gives you several ways to tag files on your machine. You can drag one or even dozens of files to a drop box (that hides on the edge of your screen), or you open up the ‘tagger’, which obviously, lets you tag the media you’ve dropped in. Punakea keeps track of all the tags you enter on your machine and on any external drives, so it auto-finishes your words for you. If I want to tag a few dozen clips with: Larry, Jay, Anacortes, Pacific, Ocean, and Sunset – I only really have to type “La… J… Ana… Pa… Oc… Su”. 4. Color coding: This helps distinguish between cameras visually much faster – I *do* use a naming convention that tells me the camera model, the tape number, and the clip number, for example: “z1u_t019_c” is what I would enter into the description area within FCP’s capture window, then FCP would progressively number each break, giving me: z1u_t019_c-9… z1u_t019_c-10… etc. But each physical tape is wrapped in a colored sticky note, yellow for the Fx1 (which almost always had the HDV35 kit attached), purple for z1u (which was generally the wide), and orange for HC1 (that was used mostly in interviews). The same colors are applied to the file, so in Finder I can quickly scan through and see where the tapes end and begin. 5. Transcribing + Metadata: Bill Cammack brought up a great tip, suggesting that on top of transcribing the interviews and important conversation into script form, that by tagging the clips with, as an example, the first four words to an important sentence, I can easily search for both (the clip, and the script) with just a few keywords. Which works perfectly in Punakea’s Browser: by clicking on the tags “Larry” and “Conversations”, I can see a cloud of script-snippets between Larry and whom-ever else. 6. Searching / Browsing: What good is all this tagging without a way to find and filter this info’ just as fast as I can type it – spotlight does allow me to quickly find what I’m looking *for*… but if I’m just looking around for ideas, it doesn’t do me much good. Punakea has a ‘browser’ window, that shows me a tag-cloud for everything associated with Pedal. Each time I choose a series of tags it narrows down the cloud. As long as I’m detailed in my tagging, including the: who, what, where, and when – in just a few seconds I can find every clip and photo I have of, for example: “Jay Bicycling (with) Larry (in) Washington (near) Marblemount”… weather it’s HD footage, 16mm, Mp4, a Polaroid scan, or digital still. 7. Room for improvement: Sadly there is no spotlight feature in FCP, you can use ‘Find’ of course – and have it create a pop-up bin of results, but the tags aren’t search’able. So… there’s this bridge of info’, on one hand, I can find exactly what I need, or browse in a much more visual and creative way for media… but then I have to either a) re-dump that media into the timeline, or b) go search for the file I decide I want in FCP. I’m hoping that if any editing suite is going to be an early adopter of system-wide metadata and tags, it’s going to be Apple’s Final Cut. But when that will happen and how it will be implemented is anyone’s guess. In the meantime, I plan to continue to work with both apps to speed up the overall workflow. 8. Step away from the computer: Bill, again, has this great tip to share in the comments of a workflow vlog (if you’d like to *see* what I’m blabbering on about) I did several weeks ago: The tip from Ultan, which really blew my mind in its simplicity is very similar to what you’re doing with Punakea, going outside the program to increase your efficiency and productivity. What he did as we were working on a project was he kept scribbling on stickies and placing them on the wall in the order of our cut. Each stickie had reference words to the dialogue on them as well as the reference ID of the clip that I had in the timeline. I thought what he was doing was very funny (and useless)… until he started rearranging our edit in spit seconds by merely removing a stickie and switching it with another one so the flow of the dialogue changed. We were able to arrange the edit *on*the*wall* MUCH faster than I would have been able to rearrange the edit on the machine, play it down and undo it if we didn’t like it. I was completely amazed at something so simple making us so incredibly efficient, and when we were done, all I had to do was match up the reference IDs of the clips to the order they were now arranged in on the wall. I think this is a great tool – but something I will hold off on until my edit is a bit more laid out – and needs fine tuning. Getting caught up for days re-splicing and re-aranging in the timeline can get you no where some days. And this tip, of stepping back, and using a large blank wall to visualize your edit is a perfect way to switch creative gears. If you liked this post, please share it on del.icio.us or on Digg. I’d appreciate it. :)