Beginnger question on workflow

My workflow for still imaging evolved to where it is today. When I look through old film and early digital stuff, it is a disorganized mess compared to now.

I thought it might be better to find "the better way" now before we have a pile of tapes and files that look like my closet.

Workflow for idiots questions:

Assume you make a dive trip and you have tapes 1-10 of footage, each tape has multiple clips from several dive. You make dive trip 2 and have ten more tapes of footage, say tapes 11-20.

1. What system do you use to label your tapes?

2. Do you capture the entire 40 minute average time from all 10 tapes? If so, do you dump the crap later in order to save drive space?

3. Is each dive trip a "project"

What's the best "go-to" resource for FCP for Dummies? The number of Photoshop books and tutorials is about equal to the rupiah it takes to buy a D3x (no exaggeration Drew ), but far less for FCP.

If I may tag in on this thread; my questions are the same. Just bought a Sony HDR-SR12 as my wife is planning to get into underwater video. (Have not housed it yet). Is there any downside to starting out with iMovie before maybe progressing to FCP? Will all the files / libraries, projects etc be easily transferable? I'm going to start shooting some clips at work for website marketing stuff, so I plan to just start with iMovie.

George,

do a search on "logging" in this subforum. There's a thread I remember dealt with no.1. Time names down to minutes + location is a great way name tapes. I use software to list details as keywords. The info is in that thread.

No.2... there are 2 schools... Wagsy's sucking it all in and clip batch editing. Quite a bit has been discussed over the years. Wearing out camera head vs drive space. You'll have to do a major search in the forums and sift a bit.

No.3: I would use a new project. Cleaner to deal with.

I learnt my editing old skool (coming from Avid and Media Composer) so I can't really help for FCP for Dummies. If there's an apple store near you, they have regular classes for the basics. I find watching real life better than watching a DVD or reading a book... even for 500rupiah.

Jeff, imovie is easy for basic editing and titling. Most consumers are happy with it. However, I think with AVCHD, it has to transcode to AIC and that takes up a lot of space. 1TB drives are now under $100 so it's not that expensive but still an issue for long term storage. Search this subforum for the threads.

I think every one has different workflows and styles that works for them, so keep that in mind, but I will put my two cents in I started typing this a bit ago this morning and started to redo some things for the tutorial I was working, and see Jeff added a question and Drew also added some things and as Drew indicated there are a few approaches.

1. What system do you use to label your tapes?

 

2. Do you capture the entire 40 minute average time from all 10 tapes? If so, do you dump the crap later in order to save drive space?

 

3. Is each dive trip a "project"

 

What's the best "go-to" resource for FCP for Dummies?

I label tapes with year, month, day, divesite(s) so 20090117_CoolReef and may jot a quick note on the case. I also just capture the tapes fully onto hard drives. Though Log & Capture is something many use, I am going to watch everything anyway at some point and with hard drives so inexpensive it works out fine. DV/HDV is 12-13 Gigs an hour (more if you are using AIC/ProRes), so you can get 50 hours+ on a 750 Gig hard drive with HDV/DV, less with the other codecs, but to me it is worthwhile just to do it that way. I make a general folder for each trip (200812_Mexico for instance) then capture each tape into seperate projects using the capture window to name the clips by filling in the fields with "20090117_CoolReef" then each clip captured (I have settings for new clips automatically generated) will have the name 20090117_CoolReef_1, 20090117_CoolReef_2 etc.

I will then drag all the clips onto the timeline and do a quick scrub through (or watch depending) to see what I have and do a rough edit. Meaning the real non-starters get tossed, but keep things that could work or are unique. I then copy that timeline and do a edit or two off that. One is a longer edit more for myself or others on the dive where I will leave shots in/make the segments a bit longer since I was on the dive, then a short edit.

Taking good notes of the shots is important, there are different ways of doing it, from a notebook, to dropping notes into final cut and software. Depending on the footage, you can even use iPhoto and keywords

As to sites, apple.com, creative cow. Steve does articles for http://www.kenstone.net and that is a good resource. And of course Wetpixel.

Do not let Final Cut get too daunting, it can do a million things but like many things 10% of the features will do 90% of the work. Get to know the video scopes and the three way color corrector. Will post something shortly for you, I have been meaning to do some tutorials on this but have not really gotten around to finalizing them. EDIT TO ADD: Still Not Really Final But Can Jump Start Things

@Jeff iMovie is fine for many things and I use it from time to time. Not sure which version of iMovie you are running, because depending on the version of Final Cut vs iMovie, Final Cut may or may not open it. Also the way iMovie captures things, there will be some rendering in Final Cut needed (not sure if this changed with the recent versions, have not used iMovie in awhile to capture, so take it with a grain of salt. )

I always capture the whole tape, scrub through and cut the good stuff out and drop into a time line. Then set up another sequence, and use the first timeline sequence as the source of clips.

I found a great way to learn FCP is initially the free seminars at the Apple shops, then one of the many excellent training DVD's like VLC or Ripple. As Drew says don't be daunted by it, learn the 3-way CC basic edits and transitions and you will be fine.

Jon