I love Final Cut
The only expensive part of our production process, is the use of Final Cut, Apple’s professional video editing package. Although these days it’s cheap enough to be a serious option for hardcore hobbyists, so we’re not too fussed about using it as part of our proof of process.
One of the things I love about Final Cut, and most other video editors to be honest, is the disconnect between the project timeline and the raw footage. A project can exist, with it’s timeline, regardless whether the footage is actually on the hard drive, or still in it’s raw form on tape. Final Cut keeps track of where your footage is, and manages your project accordingly.
We have a dedicated 500GB firewire drive for Bonny & Clyde. Our single Final Cut project contains every episode so far, and most of the footage we’ve shot, so at any point in our workflow, we can check back in previous episodes, and look at anything that’s been shot. Once an episode is complete, we take a master copy of it using the Final Cut Media Manager, which creates a new project file for just that episode, and stores it on the same drive.
Last week the drive died, and we lost everything. Luckily however (well, by design really) Final Cut was configured to continually autosave projects to a backup drive. We simply copied those autosaves to a new 500GB, and we were up and running again. The raw footage had to be re-logged from our tapes, but Final Cut simply prompts you for which tape, and goes off and captures all the footage for you.
As it was, we spent about 2 hours recovering from the crash, and got the episode out on time.
If you’re using Final Cut, there’s two things you must use to protect your work, autosave, and clip logging. On small projects, I tend to just tell Final Cut to bring down the footage, without logging the clip first, which is fine. But if you have a large project, where you may lose or need to delete raw footage, without the clips being logged, you’ll have a difficult time finding the correct tape and in/out points to re-capture your footage.