What were the most tapes/files you had to capture as an editor's assistant?

[spinnerlys]

Hi,

I was wondering if any of you, who work(ed) as an editor's assistant or even as an editor ever had to capture tons of tapes for one project.

Currently I'm working as an assistant and have to digitize 12-18 Digi Beta and up to 50 DV tapes into one project. As the current project revolves around the candid camera format, there are multiple cameras running simultaneously, which I and others then have to synch into groups (Avid Media Composer).

Lately I think that 60 tapes per day is a little much, as it takes longer than a day to get them into Avid and we already have used 1200 tapes. I think it's due to poor management and planning by the production house, but my endeavours into other houses has showed me, that there is always some poor planning involved.

So what are your experiences regarding the amount of tapes you had to get into the editing application of the production house' choice?

 

[Keebler]

well, i'm not an editor's assistant, but i transfer home videos for clients as my business and I recently had projects of 32, 52 and 29 hours worth of VHS, miniDV and VHS-C tapes.

That is alot of work considering each transfer 1 hour is regular running time, then the mpeg2 compression and dvd builds. I charge for it, but wow.

 

[LethalWolfe]

Reality TV has to generate the most footage per show by far. I worked on a Reality show once that had a 10 day shoot for 9 episodes and they generated around 2500hrs of footage. Most of it was shot with 30min loads so there were probably around 4000 tapes total.


Lethal

 

[spinnerlys]

Reality TV has to generate the most footage per show by far. I worked on a Reality show once that had a 10 day shoot for 9 episodes and they generated around 2500hrs of footage. Most of it was shot with 30min loads so there were probably around 4000 tapes total.


Lethal

4000 tapes? Wow....

Were they kept for storage in an archive, or were those tapes deleted after the show aired?

And btw, what labeling system did you use for telling the tapes apart?

I use unique identifiers like a number that contains the year and then the number of the project in that year. For example 094987 means shot in 2009, 4th project and tape number 987, which has the slight disadvantage of only allowing 1000 tapes before a new project number has to be used, but as the number of unique productions don't exceed 5 projects per year it's not a problem.

If I remember correctly, you mentioned using FCP quite some times. Did you name every tape/reel when they were captured individually?
I use "094987 BC 181009 DV H 178" for example, with the unique number upfront, followed by the project title abbreviation, date, tape type, camera and number of tape for that camera, as we have to recapture the Digi Beta footage for the final master sequence, as it is only captured with a 10:1 resolution to save storage space, as we only have a measly 8-10 TB for the candid camera show.

Sorry for the long post, I'm just curious about other work procedures and such, and learning a thing or three.

Edit: I used quite a lot of asses.

 

[LethalWolfe]

The tapes themselves are probably in cold storage somewhere, but after each episode was finished we nuked that episode's raw footage to free up space. I think we kept footage for three shows at a time on the Unity (it was an Avid show) as well as a copy of each show to be used for promo's and teases. This show was a long time ago but IIRC the naming convention we used was Month Day Cam Load (ex. 0312A15 for march 12th, cam A, tape# 15) and that was entered for each tape so we could recapture later for the online. We also kept a log w/detailed information about each tape (contents, when it was captured, who captured it, what system it was captured on, etc.).


No problems w/the Q's and/or long posts. You can't learn if you don't ask questions.


Lethal

 

[bigbossbmb]

on the show I work on, we capture 15:1s and name XXXMMDDYYCCC

XXX=show abbreviation (2-3 digits)
then month, day, year
then camera (a, b, c, etc)+2 digit number

so an example would be DK043009A03 (3rd tape, A cam, April 30th 2009, DK project)

we keep our media for the entire season (shoot about 1k-1.2k half-hour tapes per season) and we keep interviews from the previous season.