This is “The DSLR Cinematography Guide,” not “The DSLR Post-Production Guide,” so these sections will be a bit shorter (if I expand them, ...
This is “The DSLR Cinematography Guide,” not “The DSLR Post-Production Guide,” so these sections will be a bit shorter (if I expand them, maybe I’ll move them to their own separate guide one day). The chief issue with DSLR post-production is transcoding your camera’s files to an editable format (their natives files aren’t optimal for editing) and synching audio (if you recorded it separately). Thankfully Canon has released their own plugin for Final Cut-based editors that takes care of the transcoding, but read on for my suggested workflow, storage solutions, transcoding recommendations, and other workarounds. If you want someone else’s (longer) take, check out Oliver Peters’ post.
This applies to video editing in general, not just DSLR-originated footage, but because of my past experiences with data loss, I hope I can help others avoid the same fate. Some of this will be obvious advice for those of you with video editing experience, so feel free to skip to the next section if you’re a seasoned editor… First off, never edit video on the same hard drive that you’re running your operating system on. While you can save your program files on your internal drive, for the video files themselves you’re going to want a separate drive (usually an external drive).
Some tips when buying an external drive: • If possible, buy a drive enclosure that has a fan. Heat is a killer. • Buy the fastest interface your computer has (obviously). USB 2 is a minimum; if you have a Firewire port, get a Firewire drive; even if it’s FW400, it will be faster than USB 2.0 eSATA is a good deal faster than both but FW800 is also quick. If you notice those different links return a lot of the same results, it’s because many drives have multiple interfaces; this is a good thing for portability between machines. • Don’t buy LaCie. I’m sure they make some decent products, but I’ve known too many people who’ve had LaCie drives fail on them (myself included) to be able to recommend their drives. Maybe this is because their drives are very popular and therefore there are more of them out there, but still. I don’t trust ‘em. • If you’re going with a multi-drive RAID enclosure, don’t use RAID 0 unless you’re going to be doing daily backups — “RAID 0″ should actually be “AID 0,” because there is nothing Redundant about it. If you can afford it, get a good 4-drive enclosure and set it to RAID 5. • Look for drives that run at 7200RPM instead of 5400RPM. They’re a good deal faster.
However, I would not recommend 10000RPM drives unless you have cash to burn, as they’re significantly more expensive than 7200RPM drives — without being a proportionately faster (for the best bang-for-buck, build a multi-drive RAID array out of 7200RPM drives). If you’re shooting in 1080p you’re going to need a lot of space; 1TB is a good place to start these days. You can also build your own enclosure if you have a spare hard drive sitting around; I’ve built four cheap ones using this ugly Rosewill enclosure, because it has a big-ass fan and is USB2 and eSATA. Suffice to say this ugly drive has never failed on me, which is not to say that “this is a a great drive enclosure,” but I take it as evidence that a cooling fan should be a necessary feature for external drives — in the same time period I’ve been using this Rosewill, I’ve had three fanless LaCie drives brick themselves in my possession.
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