Archive for the ‘folder structures’ Category
Friday, September 13th, 2013
I highlighted in http://blog.davidesp.com/archives/598 (10 months ago) that Adobe Premiere etc. can adulterate media files, in terms of metadata and/or sidecar-files (depending on user-configurations of these applications. I indicated that, regardless of the reasonableness of at least some of these actions, this could potentially cause problems to other applications.
Validating that concern, I note a post (2012-06-12) by Matt Davis on Philip Bloom’s website, stating (my italics):
- …if sharing assets with FCPX and Adobe Premiere, Adobe ‘touches’ (resets the modification date) of each file without doing anything else to it, but also sprinkles sidecar files into directories of transcodable files for metadata, thus sending any returning FCPX activity into a tailspin, requiring a re-linking session. It’s oddities like these which haunt the implementation of FCPX in a wider system and make system managers wonder if FCPX is actually worth implementing in its current state.
That was over a year ago, and so the issue may or may not exist for the current version of FCPX.
As users, whether or not the actions of one application adhere to standards and another don’t, what we as users ultimately care about is workflow, which in this case translates to “does it connect up with my other tools/processes?”. So we have to maintain a “situational awareness” of potential interoperability pitfalls.
Incidentally, I recall that FCPX’s predecessor (in history at least, if not development-line) FCP7 could adulterate source directories with its own sidecar files, produced by its SmoothCam effect. Not knowing anything further for sure, I nevertheless wondered (at that time) what it might be doing “under the hood” of the QuickTime [.mov] wrapper.
Posted in After Effects, Apple, collaboration, FCP7, FCPX, file mgt, Final Cut, folder structures, Formats, Premiere, roundtrip, SmoothCam, video | No Comments »
Saturday, August 11th, 2012
How, on a Mac OS system, to do the equivalent of TREE in DOS:
http://murphymac.com/tree-command-for-mac/
- find . -print | sed -e ‘s;[^/]*/;|____;g;s;____|; |;g’
- And there is much more on ths in the article, including how to add this “command” to user profile.
My crude adaption of it, to list only the main directories in my [Media] area:
- find . -type d \! -name “BPAV” \! -name “CLPR” \! -name “TAKR” \! -name “929*” -print | sed -e ‘s;[^/]*/;|____;g;s;____|; |;g’
- Crude but delivered what I wanted.
Posted in file mgt, folder structures, linux, Mac, scripting, tidy, unix | No Comments »
Thursday, October 27th, 2011
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/
Posted in 10-bit depth, camera technique, codec, collaboration, Encoding, enhance, FCP7, file mgt, film, filters, Final Cut, folder structures, Formats, gamma, grading, iPhone, lens, levels, lighting, logging, moviemaking, MovieSlate, Mpeg StreamClip, Music, ProRes, recording, render, self-organization, Setup, Sony EX XDCAM, Sony F3, Sony FS100, SteadiCam, storage, storyboard, transcode, tutorials, wide-angle, workflow, XDCAM EX, XML | No Comments »
Friday, August 27th, 2010
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])
Posted in audio, folder structures, Music, Nokia N95 | No Comments »
Monday, May 17th, 2010
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
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.
Posted in Final Cut, folder structures, tidy | No Comments »
Saturday, May 15th, 2010
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
- 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)?
Requirements
- Tidy organization
- Easy to find stuff, including serendipitously.
- Easy to manage stuff, e.g. archiving / shelving and reinstating.
- Performance
- 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…)
Posted in backup, Final Cut, folder structures, Mac, near-line, storage, tidy | No Comments »
Saturday, May 15th, 2010
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 +.
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’.
Posted in file mgt, Final Cut, folder structures, Mac, storage, tidy, Video Computer Technology | No Comments »