Digitialize 1000hrs footage and digital asset management

[rtao]

hi folks,

We need to digitialize our 1000hrs+ DV footage and we are looking for a good digital asset management solution at the same time. We will have FCP in our studio, but will it be a good digital asset management solution apart from a great editing software? It will be great if someone could give me some suggestion. 🙂 🙂

thx

 

[Sdashiki]

you need to capture and edit over 1000hrs...thats 42 days, of footage?


even with 10 computers, you are talking at least a full week of capturing before everything is set.

not to mention the impossible amount of space that much video would take up...

perhaps you need to elaborate.

 

[spicyapple]

Try CatDV.

1000 hours is a lot of footage. You may need to look into SAN solutions to handle all that footage.

 

[ChrisA]

hi folks,

We need to digitialize our 1000hrs+ DV footage and we are looking for a good digital asset management solution at the same time. We will have FCP in our studio, but will it be a good digital asset management solution apart from a great editing software? It will be great if someone could give me some suggestion. 🙂 🙂

thx

First off. DV is 12GB per hour. So you are going to need at least 12,000 gigabytes of storage. That's 12 terabytes. This is a serious amount of space and you have to think about the future too. It you need 12Tb today you will likley need more so you want to select a storage system that can grow. The most common advice is to buy a system that is 50% full on day one. So you are looking at systems that can hold about 24TB. You don';t ned to fully populat the system with disk drives but you DO want slots for those drives.

With 50 drives in a box assume a drive lasts on average 3 years before it fails. You can expect then 50 failed drives every three years or one failed drive per month. How to dael with this?? the answer is RAID. You need a RAID system and you want 2 or 3 "hot spare" drives so the system can automatically rebuild failed drives and let you swap them out when you have the time.

Apple can sell you the storage you need but I'd seriouly recommend you look at solutions from Sun. You also need to concider backup. It should be clear you will not be using a UBS hard drive as a backup device. You are clearly in need of a robotic DLT tape system. and a plan that involves rotaing the tapes through some off-site location.

Yes storage s expensive but what did it cost to shoot all that video? I can't picture it being done for less than $100 per hour so what's that? A $100K investment

You could buy a few of these www.apple.com/xserve/raid/ but concider something like this too www.sun.com/storagetek/disk_systems/midrange/6140/features.xml

I'll let someone else talk about video asset magagment software. You don't say how many workstations will be accessing this data. I assume a small handfull of people will be editing and reviewing this at any one time. Either of the above system can support this with performance to spare.

 

[spicyapple]

Normally with this much footage, you would be well-advised to log your footage and mark which shots are good and bad. Then you can build an edit list from your good shots and have those captured in a low-res format for rough cutting.

You then take the rough-cut and batch capture the final video. This way, you don't need 12 TB of on-line storage.

 

[rtao]

thx guys

all of our footages are well logged and valuable archive, rather than hardware advices, I would like to have software system advices on how to well organize all the clips for easy retrival. To be clear, we want a database system for video much like Adobe Bridge/iView Media Pro for photos. 🙂 🙂

 

[virus1]

i reccomend foottrack.

 

[RedTomato]

I had a quick look at FootTrack and CatDV. One is $50, and the other is $150. They're aimed at home users or low-end pros.

If you are spending about $100k on storage and capture, then these two applications are not suitable for your needs. You need high-end asset management software.

A crash or database loss or mangled software upgrade could lead to you having to re-log everything, or populate the asset database again - which could cost you thousands.

I suggest you go talk to some professional post-production houses and outline your situation and ask them what they use. They'll have bomb-proof systems.

If you will be regularly using this footage, you might even have to pay for professional advice on setting up interfaces and workflow - the wrong interface or workflow could mean a waste of your 100K investment in hardware as people find it too much of a pain to use.

If you're not planning to regularly use it, then hell, stick it on a RAID rack, get CatDV or something similar but a bit more expensive and forget it.

 

[ChrisA]

we want a database system for video much like Adobe Bridge/iView Media Pro for photos. 🙂 🙂

What about the browser built into Final Cut Pro? It works much like Bridge and alows the user to search and sort clips based on all kinds of catagories. Then users can view or "scrub" the clips. It uses the same ideas as iTunes and iPhoto and the like in that LINKS to clips go inside foders. so media can go into many folders but exist physically on disk only one. Get a book on FCP and read the chapter on asset managment and see if it meets your needs

Questons are how this works with a really large archive and if many users can all access the same database at once. I assume you have many users

You may be asking this inthe wrong form