Digital video workflow – managing clips?

[scuba-suzy]

Hello, I’m a bit of a video newbie so this apologies if this is a silly question. When I had my gopro 2 I just used to take the folder of clips, import them into iMovie, scroll thru, reject the ones that were useless and use little bits of the others in my project. Add in any iPhone footage, do the same and then export the movie. Job done. It was a bit clunky but worked for very small projects. Now I have a problem – I need to expand my workflow to bigger projects and include cineform for gopro. I’m sure I’m doing it in the least efficient way possible – which is where you guys come in with excellent advice hopefully!

What I’m looking for is advice on a simple workflow strategy that will allow me to more successfully manage my many clips, process out the rubbish parts at an early stage, convert using cineform for the gorpro clips.

I’m on a mac and software I have at the moment is cineform (gopros free offering which seems file for converting, flipping 180, and editing the colours etc), iMovie for organising the processed clips into a movie, lightroom (I’m using this for stills), bridge (I’ve found this useful for previews) and A timelapse clip maker (where you chuck it a folder and it makes you the timelaspe clip). I don’t think I necessarily need to change software, just the approach in the early stages. I’m interested in what everyone else does to solve this dilemma?

Ideas anyone?

Thanks
Suzy

 

[ronscuba]

Good question.

Here is where a little bit of pain at the beginning can help in the long run. Watch every clip and decide which are garbage and which are keepers. Convert only the keepers. Name the keepers by subject. Lobster 1, lobster 2, fish school, reef 1, reef 2, reef, 3, sponge, sunset, etc.. Put the clips into a folder named after your trip location. Bonaire 2013.

Then when you edit you can easily find the subject you want. In the future when you want to use the sunset shot from Bonaire 2013, you can find it.

As you get more experienced, you will have less garbage footage and the above workflow won't be too bad.

 

[scuba-suzy]

yeah, I was afraid that was going to be the answer... unfortunately I'm a snapper and there are just so many!

 

[avigulf]

Good advice Ron. This is also how i do it. Make a sort before import to editing sw.

 

[ronscuba]

yeah, I was afraid that was going to be the answer... unfortunately I'm a snapper and there are just so many!

Well, there is no way around having to watch the footage. Renaming the file is just one more step.

It is common for people new to video and photo to shoot everything. We learn to be selective over time. For workflow and editing purposes, in general it is best to shoot a bunch of short clips than one long continuous clip.

 

[yarik83]

I shoot everything even though I have been filming since 2008. I do so because 99.9% of the time by time 6 other divers turn their cameras on to point at something, that something swims away and I got it on all 3 of my cameras. Yep it adds to editing time but hey... I stick to ideology that it is better to have 6 hours of video footage on a 2 tank dive than have 10 minutes worth of footage and discovering that camera fogged up, or you forgot to remove the air bubble or some other odd reason why your short clip did not work. Half the people I talk to on boats with gopros keep telling me that their buttons do not work underwater... I would not want to be caught in that situation.

I start my edits by organizing a folder. I upload 3 camera's worth of footage. Each camera has its own folder. Each folder will contain Dive_Name#. All subsequent edits will be called Dive_Name#_Edit#.

If you want to maintain a library of stuff... you can do what I also do. I make a copy of "cuts" and drop them into my "cuts" folder which has like 50 subfolders each filled with species (ie Angel Fish folder, Puffer Fish folder....)

Most of the time I only see what is in front of me. You would not believe how many times I discover things in my video that I did not pay attention to during the dive. Having that footage allows me to find those cool things and integrate them into overall deliverable. You can adapt your shooting style to your needs (ie if filming a dive class you may only film a couple of minutes).

 

[EL Pistoffo]

I shoot everything even though I have been filming since 2008. I do so because 99.9% of the time by time 6 other divers turn their cameras on to point at something, that something swims away and I got it on all 3 of my cameras. Yep it adds to editing time but hey... I stick to ideology that it is better to have 6 hours of video footage on a 2 tank dive than have 10 minutes worth of footage and discovering that camera fogged up, or you forgot to remove the air bubble or some other odd reason why your short clip did not work. Half the people I talk to on boats with gopros keep telling me that their buttons do not work underwater... I would not want to be caught in that situation.

I start my edits by organizing a folder. I upload 3 camera's worth of footage. Each camera has its own folder. Each folder will contain Dive_Name#. All subsequent edits will be called Dive_Name#_Edit#.

If you want to maintain a library of stuff... you can do what I also do. I make a copy of "cuts" and drop them into my "cuts" folder which has like 50 subfolders each filled with species (ie Angel Fish folder, Puffer Fish folder....)

Most of the time I only see what is in front of me. You would not believe how many times I discover things in my video that I did not pay attention to during the dive. Having that footage allows me to find those cool things and integrate them into overall deliverable. You can adapt your shooting style to your needs (ie if filming a dive class you may only film a couple of minutes).

I've heard the same thing, leave camera recording whole dive to avoid missing any opportunities. I plan on doing the same but it brings up a dilemma for me. 1 min of video right off the sd card is about 380MB roughly. After initial conversion through Cineform to AVI format that 384MB turns into 2.5GB. That for 1 min of raw video. Now multiply that by say 45 min=112 GB. Thats damn big for less than an hour of video. Then it's loading that into editor to start trimming clips.

Now I'm kinda jumping the gun here because I haven't actually worked on a video of this length or size yet but will that be a problem? My understanding is that you need the initial conversion to AVI to make the file more easily digestible by editing software. Is there another way? I have 16GB of RAM but not so much hard drive space. Can the video be cut into clips first before initial conversion to AVI through Cineform? Will the editing app even handle a 100GB+ video without crapping out?

I've been trying different workflows the past few days to get to a working final product but it has been with very short clips.

 

[3D diver]

I use the GoPro 3D hero system and have a few extra steps I have to go through:

1) create a directory for the dive and 4 sub-directories---raw clips, converted clips, exported clips, and working (for my Pinnacle 16 editor)
2) I transfer the raw clips from my gopros (1 for each eye) to the raw clips directory and import them into Cineform
3) Cineform converts them into side-by-side 3D AVI files and saves them into the converted clips directory
4) I then have to adjust the vertical alignment, again in Cineform, and export an MP4 version to the exported directory
5) Next I import the 3D clips into Pinnacle which places copies in the work directory
6) for some reason Pinnacle doesn't automatically recognize the clips as being 3D so I have to go through a multi-click procedure to identify them as 3D

At this point I can actually start editing the clips, add music (recorded myself), titles, etc.

Occasionally, Cineform has trouble and I have to use Pinnacle to combine some, or all, of the clips into 3D. I'm doing so tonight with one clip that only had audio on one camera (not the one Cineform uses).

So here, after all that work I need some views, eh?

[video=youtube_share;M28TC-c_31k]http://youtu.be/M28TC-c_31k[/video]

 

[yarik83]

Gopro is a nimble little beast. .mp4 and .mov shoot in almost uncompressed format hence file size. That being said each format has a limitation by default. You can get a 112gb file but it may or may not play. I know with my software a 3hr long video clip will spit out some sort of error during export saying something about file mismatch.

I shoot 1080 at 60fps with auto white balance and no protune. I get about 10.5 gb/hr consumption. I have 32gb micro sd cards in my cameras so after filming for 2 hrs 15 mins my cards still have about 10gb of space left.

If you are shooting raw then file size will be huge. A 64 gb card might help you but from what I understand that is as high as hero 3 accepts.

There is an inherent flaw with .mp4 and .mov with respect to encoding. Also gopro records in 3.8gb segments or 17 some odd minute clips.

I have gigabytes upon gigabytes of data. I manage all that on portable and stationary external hard drives, laptop and a desktop. I use corel videostudio pro x4 and I never work with clips that are longer than 1.5 hrs. I subdivide them into 3-5 projects if need be, edit all those, export stuff and then take 3-5 outputs and put them into one final project where I can kick out deliverable.

For sake of data integrity I would be very weary about using huge file sizes. Last thing you want is to spend hours and hours editing only to find out you can't export the clip.

*Edit:

I work with .mp4 and .mov files only. I import .mp4 directly into corel without cineform. My output is .mp4 also.

Only thing I use cineform for is creation of timelapse. I can do that in corel but its easy as pie in cineform so I use that instead.

 

[Nagel616]

I have a neat little trick I use to make it easier to spot the things I want, and keep file sizes smaller. I do subscribe to the theory of "keep it running" because how many shots are lost due to "I was just turning the camera on"...

So, I start recording when I jump in. When I film something I want to "tag" I finish filming it, then stop the video and start a new one. For the most part, I know the really cool things are at the tail ends of my clips, and by stopping and starting after I make more, smaller files rather than one giant one (which even if it does manage to be read, would bring my computer to its knees)