New on the forum - media storage questions

Hello

Just joined after dabbling with FCPX for a few months. I'm an audio professional and have picked up a contract to shoot a large series (50+) 8-10 minute corporate training clips.

I'm thinking about the best way to structure storage for editing and eventual archiving.

Shooting on 2 Canon DSLRs, and editing on a 2012 Mac Pro 3.3 6-core, which is also the (audio) studio's DAW.
I will have at least 2x3TB HDs in the Mac, and currently have a system SSD and 480GB media SSD. Not sure that I really need to use the media SSD given that I will largely be working with 2 streams of ProRes 422 or Proxy - I imagine one of the 3TB SATA drives will be fine for this?

I'm trying to get my head round a good workflow with the new Library structure - how does the following sound?

I copy all the camera card files for the day's shooting into folder on one of the 3TB internals (the Original Media HD), then start a new library for each 8-10 min programme on the other 3TB HD. The HQ and (if needed, I don't think I will need to use it) Proxy files will go into the same Library.

After the programme is signed off I archive after deleting all HQ, Proxy and Render files, leaving a fairly small project to archive, plus the original clip files on the Original Media HD (backed up daily with CCC to an offsite drive).

Should I use FCPX's backup facility to do daily backups of current work Libraries to an external HD in case the main SATA drives fail, and delete these after archiving?

Does this sound fairly sane, or am I missing something? Is it a bad idea to have the Library not contain the Original Media in this situation?

Many thanks, this forum is a fantastic resource.

David

Hi, I would suggest to make a folder for each program, inside here it would put each library, and original footage, sound work, graphics etc. that belongs to each program.

This way it will be easy to archive each program.

Check out my tool for cleaning up libraries before archiving:

tiny.cc/1wr47w

/helge, norway

I do this all the time, we to coporate work, and make videos that are 2-3 minutes all the time and we use a pre-made folder structure for each program. On start, we duplicate the folder-structure and rename the top-level folder for each program, then we put all stuff into this. When program is done, we clean up (using my tool) and then send to an archive disk (two of them, for duplicate and security). Then we just delete the whole project from our working/shared storage.

If we need to redo some stuff later (re-edit, versioning, update), we restore the whole folder from our archive, edit, cleanup and sync back to archive. Or make a new if there is a lot of difference.

Hi David, welcome to the forum.

Your media storage layout sounds very sane to me. You have calculated a fair amount of security into your workflow, which is always a very wise thing to do.

Storing the card files on one HDD and creating your Libraries for importing the original media from the cards (but without copying them over) to the second HDD is in this case a better option than physically copying the Original Media into the Library. Once your media is optimized this gives you two sets of the media on two different drives. As you are also backing up the Original Media to an offsite drive you can safely say that working like this your media will be secure.

If you work with ProRes 422 optimized media your SATA drive should give you sufficient bandwidth for handling two streams, and anyway if you should experience any slowdowns the Proxy workflow is a very easy and straightforward alternative. Working off the single SSD won't not make much difference since SSD's have their own particular problems with steaming large files.

I would indeed activate FCPX's backup feature for extra security Library backups on a third external drive in case your second ATA should fail.

I think this is a well-thought workflow and should you have any further questions don't hesitate to post them here.

- Ronny