From the course: Pro Video Tips

Tips for managing your media

From the course: Pro Video Tips

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Tips for managing your media

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- This week on Pro Video Tips, I wanna share a few tips for better media management. Back in the days of MiniDV and tape, managing media was a fairly simple affair. You shot your project, digitized your tape, maybe made an extra copy, but mostly, you just made sure that your original master tape was kept someplace safe and secure, and you were good to go. All of that is completely out the window now that we live in a strictly digital video world of ones and zeroes. Everything is shot on some type of media card, be it SD cards, solid state drives, or CompactFlash, and for all practical purposes, we no longer have a master. With the push of a button or two, you can quite literally wipe out an entire day's shooting. This is a potentially dangerous and heartbreaking situation, unless you manage your media carefully. Here are my top three tips for better media management. Tip number one, make two masters whenever you can. One feature that I love about shooting with my trusty Canon C100 is that it offers dual-slot recording, which means that it has two different SD card slots, which allows me the option to record a project on two SD cards simultaneously. That means I can always have a master recording and an identical backup master. If your camera has dual media card slots and allows you to do this, I highly recommend that you do whenever it's practical. This is tremendously practical and helpful in a variety of situations, such as, if I don't want to spend an extra hour or two at the end of a gig just dumping media to a hard drive. If I need to hand off the footage right away because it needs to be quickly edited or transcribed. Or maybe because a client has only hired me to shoot raw footage for a project, but I still want a copy for myself and for my reel. Of course, the most practical reason of all, is that if one card becomes corrupt or otherwise fails me or gets lost, I'll still have a backup file. In my particular case, because I also use an external video recorder with the C100, the Atomos Ninja Blade, I can actually create three simultaneous copies of my media, albeit, one broadcast quality from the Atomos recorder, and the other two being AVCHD recordings on SD cards. For those occasions where the recorder has failed me because the HDMI cable may have been bumped, or if I wasn't paying attention on a long take and the recorder runs out of batteries, I still have the same shot captured on AVCHD on the SD card, and no one's ever been the wiser when I've had to use some of this footage in the middle of my project. Two simultaneous recordings are always better than one if you have a setup that allows you to do so. Tip number two, use a standard template for every project. One of the most important aspects of media management is organizing your media files. The bigger the project, the more important this aspect becomes, because after several days of shooting a multi-camera project, you're going to have multiple cards from multiple shooters, possibly at multiple framerates, as well. You're going to want to organize that media in as neat and logical a fashion as possible, that's going to make it easier for you or anyone else working with the footage to know exactly what you have to work with, and find exactly what you're looking for quickly and efficiently. One smart way to deal with this issue, particularly for multi-camera shoots, is to pre-structure your file folders for each project. If you know you're gonna have a two-camera project with at least three media dumps throughout the day, you would set up a master project folder, then create subfolders for each camera. You'll have a "Camera 1" folder and a "Camera 2" folder. Then, inside of each of those camera folders, you would put three folders labeled "Card 1", "Card 2", and "Card 3", or whatever terminology works best for you to distinguish each time you offload new media from that particular camera. Of course, all of these folders are gonna be empty starting out, but you've now got everything ready, so all the person downloading cards has to do is drag and drop the appropriate footage into the appropriate folder. This is an especially valuable practice if someone other than the person who shot the footage will be downloading it on-set. An even better idea is to take this pre-made file folder practice a step further and not only create empty folders for your footage, but also for all the other elements of your project, such as music, graphics, transcripts, and anything else you're gonna need in post-production. The beauty of this is that you only have to create this empty folder structure one time. Every time from then on, whenever you start a new video project, you can just copy this set of empty folders into a new master project folder, and populate it with the appropriate media or files as the project progresses. It also makes it much easier to tell at a glance exactly which element you still have to get, or may have overlooked during production. Tip number three is dealing with corrupt cards. One of the scariest problems that you can ever experience in video is a corrupt media card. When a card is corrupted, it means that the data on that card can't be read or downloaded by your computer, or even worse, the data may no longer even be there. I've personally lost an entire half-day of work to a corrupted P2 card, and can testify that it's not only a disheartening and demoralizing film-making experience, but it can also wreak havoc on your shooting schedule and budget. First up, I want to talk a little about how cards can become corrupted in the first place. There's a number of things that can cause a data card to become corrupt. Some, human error, and some of them are just bad luck, but some of the more common reasons are anything that interrupts the process of writing info to a card. If you eject a card while the camera is in the act of recording to it, shut the camera off while it's in the middle of recording, remove a card from a card reader while files and folders on that card are still open on a computer, or if you naively rename or restructure the media files a camera creates. Any of these situations that interrupts the flow of data, or otherwise makes that data unrecognizable to the devices that need to read it, can corrupt your card. The best thing you can do to avoid corrupting a card yourself is to always make sure you've stopped recording before ejecting a media card. Remember to close open files on media cards, and dismount the card from a computer before removing it, and never alter any of the information, names or folders recorded to a card. Instead, you should always place the master media folder for each media card, fully intact, into a fresh, new folder that you've created, which you can then call whatever you want. But don't alter any of the data, not even folder names on your master media files. Even with these best practices, once in a while you may still experience some strange glitch, such as static shock and electric surge, or a temporary camera malfunction that can still lead to a corrupted card. Sometimes these rare anomalies will just result in a few corrupted frames of footage, and your media will still otherwise be visible and intact when played back on a camera. However, your editing program may not be able to read or import a clip or card because of these few corrupted frames of video. One potential workaround for this situation is to simply hook your camera up to another video camera, or video recorder via an HDMI or component cable. Next, play back the corrupted footage from your original camera to the second camera or recorder, where you should be able to record an exact copy of the visuals minus the corrupted data. To be clear, if there's a visual glitch in the footage, it will still be there since those frames are corrupted, but more importantly, you will now be able to import the footage for editing, and can probably, easily cut around that little, visual glitch. There's another potential solution for this same problem of a few corrupted frames, and that's if your camera allows you to divide clips in the media playback mode. I've done this on a Sony EX1 several times. The method is pretty simple, you just divide the clip into three parts by separating it on either side of the corrupted footage so that you now have three clips. The uncorrupted beginning of the clip, the corrupted middle, and the uncorrupted end of the clip. Next, you just delete the middle clip that contains a few frames or seconds of corrupted footage, and you should be back in business with two ready-to-import, error-free clips. If this quick fix doesn't work for you, another solution you may wish to consider if you have valuable footage trapped on a media card is to use do-it-yourself data recovery software. Or, to hand your footage over to a data recovery service that specializes in recovering data from dead hard drives and funky media cards. These services probably won't be cheap, but they're more than worth it for many filmmakers to recover footage that will otherwise be completely lost forever. So, those are three quick tips to help you better manage your media. Other quick tips that I would add in here are to always keep your media in a storage case. Use the write protect tabs as soon as you eject a card. Only use top-rated, name-brand media cards. There are plenty of places to save a buck in filmmaking, but your master media ain't one of them. Go ahead and ball out and get the SanDisk Extreme Class 10 super card, if you want. I say, always get the highest-rated, best-quality media storage that you can afford. That's it for this week's Pro Video Tips. I'm Anthony Q. Artis, and I'll see you all next week.

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