this is my shot at an emmy. Don't fuck it up.
July 18, 2012 10:35 AM   Subscribe

What is gonna be my best mac based workflow for editing this documentary I'm working on? details inside

A partner and I have been shooting a half-hour documentary special for the TV station we work at. As employees of the station, we have access to a BAD-ASS mac pro edit station that can handle everything we throw at it.

But...

As part of the agreement for getting to shoot this half-our documentary short, we aren't being paid outright, but all the rights to all the footage and the assembled cut will belong to us, and the station is giving up any right to any revenue we get from monetizing it after the fact.

So, knowing this, I over shot like hell for the documentary that's airing, in preparation for the longer feature length cut that I'm going to enter into festivals and seek distribution for. And, of course, since the station is no longer involved at that point, we lose our access to the bad-ass mac pro edit station.

My partner in this has a base model 2010 imac with 1tb harddrive and 8gb of ram. We will have, when it's all done, close to 2TB of 720p and 480i footage of varying framerates. We'll be able to use final cut pro 7 to continue editing on. What's the best way to handle and edit all this footage into a feature length documentary?

Should we get a couple of cheap firewire 800 drives and daisy chain them? A raid array perhaps?

If you have attempted long form editing of HD footage on previous gen iMac, what can we expect?
posted by tylerfulltilt to Computers & Internet (2 answers total) 1 user marked this as a favorite
 
Maybe you'll have better luck with this question at the Creative Cow Final Cut Pro forums...
posted by shino-boy at 4:23 PM on July 18, 2012


I would expect that using 720p prores 4:2:2 A 2010 imac would be fine. Best practice is to be safe. Make backups of your source footage. Seriously, duplicate your source media. Make sure you save frequently and use logical plain english names for files, projects, and programs.

Consider the doc a bunch of smaller scenes edited together. You may have 10 or 30 scenes in your doc that only come together at the end; Intro, Set up the stakes, Raise the stakes, Complications, Dispair, Hope, Triumph, Resolution, Postscript. Each of those scenes are like a little project that only come together in the end as one. It's allot easier to deal with all the footage once it's mentally structured as relating to particular scenes.
posted by jade east at 11:07 PM on July 18, 2012


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