An adorable sleeping puppy accompanied with soft piano music. I was testing camera equipment in early 2016 and pointed it at the new dog (Waffles). Pulled out a few fluffy adorable bits and changed out the soundtrack with some piano improvisations I’ve recorded over the years.
This recorded off my old Canon HV20 which was a great HD digital tape camera, but has a full-size HMDI cable out the back which outputs uncompressed HD unlike what it puts on tape, which is compressed and has a shallow color space.
So I bought an Atomos Ninja 2 last year and this was my first test. The Apple ProRes MOV file ended up being huge of course, just 9 minutes of footage added up to over 14 gigabytes. It’s was edited to half its original length and then compressed using two passes at full resolution, ending as a high quality HD mpeg2 file. It is just under a gigabyte in size (that’s about a 7 to 1 compression ratio if you skip the editing part). Quality costs money, time AND space, not counting the rendereing time.
TIP: Prep and even cue these projects to take advantage of what would otherwise be system down time.
At least these were organized in their own folder groups, if not in a structure by year or vendor, or even on the same drive (when you keep running out of room and have to add drives, you don’t have the time to reorganize right then.)
Now I am organizing Project Archives, with subgroups by client or category, and a second folder of disc images (or whatever the final delivery format was) as another copy of the final version, but as the shallow drawer I will need to dig in if I need another copy or maybe a quick conversion of the completed production to some new format.
Once those are organized in one location, I will immediately copy them to at least one other disc, if not two. This should happen almost immediately after the first copy is done.
In turn, one of those should be a removable or external drive that I can keep in another location if I am serious about the things on it.
—–David
P.S. I have another test video shot in an auditorium during setup, a long presentation collection and teardown that I filmed for use as a timelapse, and it’s 193 gigabytes in the original form. I compressed that to 34 gigabytes with no noticeable quality difference and freed up quite a bit of space by deleting the original, which I don’t need (I probably don’t need the back up either, but baby steps!)
Goodnight.
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