Been off filming a dance recital and ingesting the digital files. I usually film two shows and combine the best numbers in each. This gives me inspirational luck the first time through, and familiarity with dances the next. Plus when someone misses their mark or just plain doesn’t show up for a night I have it covered.
This time I shot part of the third show too, by studio request, since there was a special one-time-only guest for it.
Doing two different nights takes a little more time shooting, but I only do a quick multi-camera edit before deciding which numbers to polish, and even that gets me more familiar with the dances and appropriate pace and style presumably speeding my subsequent edit process. Also it’s fun.
So far it’s been a three-camera shoot but this time I upped it to four for just because I could, all different models for later frustration. (Had a second cameraman for a change but only on one camera.) This let me experiment with shooting event video with a Canon Rebel (wide shots) without the fear I had no backup angle. Also I put my Go Pro up in the air on my tall mic boom pole. I like the aerial but think I prefer my usual front stage floor level shot, because it made the young dancers seem more dramatic and imposing. It will be great for the more fluid lyrical numbers though. I’ll see in the edit. I have a wide angle shot like it used to provide but at a higher, less dramatic angle.
We’ll discuss camera details another time, and I also shot some video comparisons via phone, iPad and my Canon during rehearsal for a quality comparison post.
But in the meantime I have over 500 gigabytes of raw files between the many cameras and audio recorder plugged into the sound board.
It all still fits on my system but I need to decide how to backup my projects when done to make room for more, instead of continually adding larger drives to my system, right?
I was torn between buying plain drives as backup, or drives in enclosures because it seems to me that the cheap deals you want to get are not always the most reliable choices. When both the drive and the enclosure can fail, that’s not good. Besides you don’t know which it is until you try to pull the drive out to test separately. So I think I should go with raw drives, plugged into a SATA bay in my computer for the transfer, or connected via a handy SATA/IDE to USB adapter I picked up ages ago for computer support work. They should also take less space to store than my current box of different branded external drives and their various power supplies and cases.
(Vantec made it, like this one:
http://amzn.to/29AwX0v which is USB 3 and may in fact work for some less strenuous editing projects (maybe not four cameras), though I am still using the USB 2 version http://amzn.to/29gbCeI)
But I don’t want to edit on them, I will do that first in a folder named for the year, month, date and event, with subfolders by which (Friday, Saturday etc.), and in those folders by device (camera, audio).
Those are the assets I import into Adobe Premiere, in a project set to the same folder, with the project file saved under the top directory.
Back that project file up to another computer often. And expand your automatic project saves count. Be aware that you will want to use the file with the last date created to recover your project from these auto saves should you need to, not necessarily the incremental number.
I have had good luck with Western Digital drives but everyone has a favorite lucky flavor. I used to love Seagate but had poor luck with their hybrid SSD/HDD throwing out black errors and don’t like that.
You don’t want to use SSD drives for long-term offline storage; they are built for speed but when not active they do not hold data as long as magnetic disc drives according to several studies. So put them in your system, not your storage closet.
But get some drives, and you can easily back up your complete project folders, prep a project and hand it to an editor or collaborator, or just make room on your editing system for the next big thing, or video game or music library….
While you’re at it, maybe throw some important documents on one and store it with a trusted friend or family member. Trade it with a second regularly. It doesn’t take a lot of time once you make a habit of it. Like multi camera shoots.
— David
P.S. That document backup habit, you can do that with a couple of flash drives if your documents all fit on them.
Leave a Reply