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I attended, working on one of the camera units.  Had a great time, learnt lots, at all sorts of levels.  Even how to make good use of the Movie Slate application on my iPhone!  Link: http://www.fstopacademy.com/

 On the Nokia N95 8GB, where is audio recorder and where does it store?

• [Applications > Media > Voice Recorder]

Settings:

• Recording Quality = “High”, Memory in use = “Mass memory” (as opposed to “Phone memory”)

Save-Location:

• [\\Memory card\Sounds\Digital]
• (as opposed e.g. to [\\Memory card\Sounds\Sound clips])

This is how I’m doing it today:

• Local System Disk
  • Render Files
  • Thumbnail Cache Files
  • Waveform Cache Files
• Local RAIDs (One stationary, one portable)
  • _App_Specific
    • Final_Cut
      • _Projects (just for misc [.fcp] files)
      • Audio Render Files
      • Autosave Vault
      • Capture Scratch
      • Render Files
  • _Media
    • _Library
    • _Projects
      • 2010-04-30 (Client) Event
        • 010 Preparation
        • 020 Source
        • 030 Projects
          • FCP
            • EventTitle v001.fcp

Notes:

• I would have put everything on the RAID but for the Final Cut Settings interface, which only allows the first three items above to be on one location.  In contrast, the other items can be specified in a small set of possible locations, each of which can be toggled (enabled/disabled).
• The structure below [Projects] should mainly branch by function then by application.  But it will vary from (real-world) project to (real-world) project.

What’s a good folder structure for FCP?  I read and heard lots of tips from great sources, but some of them (e.g. keep [.fcp] files on local drive not Media drive) sounded questionable, at least from my context, and anyway I always want to know the underlying reason for anything.  So it’s research-time again…

• .

There are several aspects:

• .

Context

• Participants
  • Individual, small team or large team
  • Standards-based, methodical or haphazard
• Application(s)
  • Apple (FCS etc.) -centric?
  • Combination of several apps e.g. several makes of NLE
• Media
  • File size and value.
• Storage system(s)?
  • Local
    • Normal or (relatively) slow drive
    • Fast drive e.g. RAID
  • Remote (probably shared).
    • Exceedingly Slow (e.g. web via standard broadband)
    • Slow (e.g. NAS such as WD MyBook)
    • Fast but with possible latency (e.g. “Fibre Channel” / SAN)
  • Integrated
    • Final Cut Server giving seamless access to all storage including near-line (easily-retrievable archive)?
      • Near-line storage is any medium that is used to copy and store data from the hard drive to a source that is easily retrieved [http://www.wisegeek.com/what-is-near-line-storage.htm].

Requirements

• Tidy organization
  • Easy to find stuff, including serendipitously.
  • Easy to manage stuff, e.g. archiving / shelving and reinstating.
• Performance
  • User-level.
    • Keep
  • System-level
• Security

My Conclusions (so far):

• The typical professional situation involves multiple users on a SAN.   In this case:
  • Each user should configure their apps (e.g. FCP) to save small and transient files to local disk.
    • Local disk has less latency and minimization of small-file traffic on SAN improves its performance to all users.
  • An individual (or item) -specific project file, which counts as a “small and transient file”, should not be saved routinely or automatically to shared media server but only saved there on an occasional basis (e.g. at end of day or project).
    • Restricting this operation to end-of-project might “discourage” users from corrupting each other’s files, though really that’s what Permissions are for (in Mac OS X / unix).
• Much advice relates to the “typical professional situation”, not all of it is appropriate to other situations.
• .

(more…)

Reading book “Final Cut Pro Workflows” by Osder & Carman, 2008.  On page 284 it relays advice that it is best to put Project Files [.fcp] on a separate drive to the Media Drive (e.g. Media Drive= XSAN), due to:

• Safety - not all on one drive
• Avoid fragmenting the media drive (project files, cache and to a lesser extent render files) are written often (transient files?)

I’m not immediately convinced by these arguments:

• Media drive should be backed-up in any case.  I use (slower) USB drives and file-synch.
• Fragmentation may be an old-school issue, less of an issue on Mac’s HFS +.
  • Example: article at [http://www.macmousecalls.com/files/1f6efbb25f58d77390499af1f984d2c7-33.html] linking-on to [http://www.kernelthread.com/mac/apme/fragmentation]
  • Example: Larry Jordan, “Final Cut Pro Power Skills” 2010, page 34, Chapter 2, “Defragmenting Your Hard Drive”: Once popular, this technique is no longer recommended.

How to view degree of fragmentation on an HFS volume:

• [http://osxbook.com/book/bonus/chapter12/hfsdebug/fragmentation.html]
  • Command-line app to report a variety of storage-volume statistics, including fragmentation.
  • After download, can check the sha1 checksum, but this is of the executable, not the download itself ([.dmg] file).  The ’sha1′ command is inbuilt to Mac OS, as: [/usr/bin/openssl sha1].  Note the last character of ‘openssl’ is a small ‘L’ niot a ‘1′.