Storing Raw Footage - Best way to organize??

Hey.

So, I'm learning about this video editing, and made my first movie with iMovie. Having fun, and will be progressing further.

I have 30+ hours of tape to dump to disk. I am researching some external drives, as I only have a 12" iBook (for now).

My question has to do with storage and organizing of the clips that I dl from camera. What I would like to do is just have an organized repository of clips (from all 30+ miniDV tapes), and then be able to make a new movie using any clips in this repository.

Is there any 'best' way to go about this, or any advice you have. Assume I have a 1TB FW800 drive to dump this all on.

As I have only created one movie with iMovie, I'm fairly new to this. When I created this movie, I imported clips from camera into movie, and everything worked fine. Going forward though, I do not want to be restricted to using only clips from tape that I improted for that movie, etc....

Thanks in advance!

crachoar said:

Uhhh...yeah...

If you're going to edit that much - you might want to invest in a 'Final Cut' product.

In Final Cut, you can label the batch imports.

The program will go through the tape automatically (if you want it to) - or you can set in and out points for certain scenes you wish to capture.


I'd say, man it up and just get 'Pro'. But that's me...

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Well, to be honest with you, I am likely going to purchase Final Cut Studio, but not till I get a new PowerMac (hopefully in a month or two).

I was hoping to import all my miniDV tapes in the meantime, and dump them to an external disk. Wanted a good strategy around organizing them best moving forward, so I can create movies with these original clips using any software. Currently I have only iMovie on my 12" iBook.

Any help in best organizing these clips on a external disk would be great.

Espnetboy3 said:

WOW it seems everyone on here all the starters and rookies and people who just want to edit as hobbies have over a grand to dump on fcp. Life must be good for all of you guys.

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Yes, life is good, and God has abundantly blessed me.

I do consulting work as a Software Architect (J2EE/Java, etc). I like to do other things on the side, and could see possibly doing some multi media type work in the future. Who knows. Either way, these are good skills for me to have, and fun to boot.

I dont consider the money I would spend on FCP as a 'dump'. Rather, I see it as in investment.

Thanks for reminding me that life is indeed good