Several weeks ago, during a
post-production vlog update, I mentioned using a 2nd computer as a poor-man's smoothcam farm,
Leslie asked if I would write a post outlining the how-to for this. I meant to do this weeks ago, and plus today I listened to a voicemail from
Mike Hedge asking me how I was doing this. So it's time.
Before I got in a crash, and the insurance replaced my MacBook Pro, I had an alternate idea for spreading the weight of smoothcam analysis, and I'll cover both options in this post.
What's the huge benefit of smoothcamming footage before-hand? A clip that is 12 minutes long can take up to 4 or 5 hours to analyze in FCP, so if you're editing away, and want to see which take of this tracking shot you have turned out the best, and you have 4 takes, you could be waiting up to 2 days to really see which smooths out exactly the way you want. So, doing this before hand really saves you time when you're in the middle of editing.
First let's go with the way I'm doing things now, I feel like I'm about to detail cooking directions: you'll need 1)
Hazel, 2) a secondary computer you can leave on 24/7, and 3) Final Cut Pro.
This option is very simple, now I have all the footage for the film mirrored on two drives. The main drives I work off of are firewire 800 LaCie drives (500 Gbs each, I've had too many nightmare issues with 1 TBs), and they are synced with USB drives of the same size. Except the mirrored drives are no longer connected via any cables to each-other, the firewire drives connect to the machine I edit on, and the USB are connected to a second machine altogether (they sync over my network).
I've created a Final Cut Pro project called Smoothcam Farm. FCP has a limit around 10 hours per sequence, so you can't go dumping all 100+ hours of footage in one timeline and then just walk away after dropping smoothcam on the whole batch. I've had issues with crashing if the waiting-line for smoothcam gets over 400 clips, so be careful. All the footage that is being anylised on my 2nd machine is working off of the USB back-ups, so they never slow down my editing drives.
Note that if you need to restart FCP or it crashes, you'll have to kick-start the analysis again (I'm hoping FCP fixes this in the future), even though clips in your timeline have the smoothcam filter applied, and even though it still needs to be analyzed, it just won't seem to start unless you re-apply the filter. This doesn't hurt or double-up anything.
Anyways, now that you have FCP set-up and working away on the clips you need smoothcammed, you can use Hazel to automatically sync those smoothcam reference files to the original drives you work off of.
This is as easy as making a smart-playlist in iTunes. You pick a folder or drive, tell Hazel to search for smoothcam files (.mtdf) in the last few days, and then to copy those new files over to the main drives. That's it, Hazel will automatically connect over wifi to your main machine (when it detects it on the network) and begin backing things up.
If all is working as planned - which I have never had any issues - when I'm editing in the film's main timeline, and I drag and drop the smoothcam filter onto a 30 minute long dolly shot of Larry in Montana, it immediately references the smoothcam file that my other machine analyzed, and there's no waiting at all, I can make my adjustments and move on without the 4 hour wait!
Your other option: Now most people don't have two MacBook Pros sitting around waiting to be set-up like above - I know I couldn't afford it, I had to smack my head into a car at 30 mph to get a 2nd computer - so this is another option I was testing out before, and it worked perfectly.
For this you'll need an app called
Papaya, from a company called Lighthead (they also make
Caffeine, which is the best little app ever if you don't already have it). Papaya turns your computer into it's own server, you can grab any folder or file on your machine, drag it into Papaya, and ta-da, anyone from anywhere can have access to it without the need to first upload it somewhere else. Of course, you can password protect anything you share, and it can handle massive amounts of files.
For example, both the USB drives that have the mirrored footage are shared over Papaya so I can check in at anytime from anywhere to get files I need, in total it's about 950 GBs of videos, and over 1,000 individual files. Here's a screen-grab from the machine I'm writing this post on, this is the browser view of my other laptop which is, as I'm writing, busy analyzing away:
So how could you use this app to spread out the burden of analyzing? Any friend with Final Cut Pro can be given specific access to specific files or folders that have raw footage you need smoothcammed. It doesn't matter if they live across town, or across the country; you'd drag the handful of video files you need analyzed, and set-up a password so only they can see what you're sharing. From there they can download the footage overnight, drop it into Final Cut, let it smoothcam and when it's done, they'll have a tiny smoothcam reference file for each video they dropped the filter onto. The reference file is dumped where ever the source file is at.
The other great thing about Papaya is it accepts uploads, so your friends can upload those tiny mtdf files right back to you, or they are small enough to easily just send in an email.
Papaya is the safest and most controlled way I've found of sharing your footage, which can be irreplaceable to you if stolen or misused, there's also a great activity-log that Papaya keeps so you can see a step by step of who accessed what and when and how many times.
Overall, I've smoothcammed about 40% of my footage using the first option, I have around 700 clips left that need a reference file and I've been thinking about opening up a handful of folders to select people to chip in and help with the analysis time.
Obviously, using Papaya has benefits beyond saving time with smoothcam, instant access to your footage is a huge life-saver when collaborating with other people. It would be almost impossible to upload 500+ GBs of film somewhere just so they could then in-turn download it. With your machine and personal hard-drives acting as servers; you could be editing in LA and have friends in SF and NY helping to fine-tune scenes all while keeping everything instantly accessible.
I'd love to hear your thoughts and feedback on this - if anyone out there is using interesting workflows to make the best use of time feel free to leave a comment below.
Labels: Post-Production
