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Q&A with Creating an Efficient Workflow

I'm about to shift gears into making money, Jim, before I do. Are there any questions ed first and then Jim, Do you pay any attention to the rotation speed of the destroyed now? Well, the answer is drives rotated 5400 rpm, 7200 rpm, 10,000 rpm and 15,000. The rotation speed generally is less important when you're pulling down very large files, because once you start that file, it's all sort of flowing at the same time. Rotation speed is more important when you're dealing with really small files. Think audio stack sequencing an audio sampling when you're dealing with databases where I ops input output operations are more important for video. I found that that you can spend MAWR and get marginally better performance. But I think 72 hour 100 rpm is a really nice sweet spot between storage and speed. And the other interesting thing is the faster the rotation speed, the less the drive holds. So 5400 rpm dr will hold more than which will hold more than 10,000 which will hold more than 15,00...

0 which holds more than SSD, and I needed aggress on SST for just a second. Solid state drives are really, really fast, but they're really, really expensive and they don't hold us Muchas as spending media. So I like SSD drives for the boot drive for my operating system and for my applications because it really makes everything sing. But for media storage, because I'm shooting terabytes of data, the cost of of solid state drives for media storage is not outweighed by the fact that I've got to store terabytes and terabytes of data If you're working with small projects. Bernard thinking of your space shuttle, your space needle peace got the wrong space in there. But thinking of your space little piece if you only shot a terabyte of data and you need really, really high performance and SST external drive is a really good choice, but we end up having so much data that we accumulate that it becomes cost prohibitive to do SST. Is SST faster? Yes. Ah, lot is SSD worth the money and really depends upon what your editing SSD as a boot drive, makes a great deal of sense. I recommended ssed as a media drive may or may not make sense depending upon how important budget is and how much media you're shooting. Uh, you had a question, Bernard. Just a quick question is thought about what? What hard drive to buy it, Feeling it that up 220 megabits a second, uh, USB three or or spending the extra for a thunderbolt driver, Just give me a single drive. Is there really any benefit to getting a thunderbolt, or is it just USB three for women on what I've read based upon the people I've talked to, USB is designed for smaller files. It's really good for moving small files back and forth under boulders designed for media files, very large files moving back and forth. Given the fact that I work exclusively with media, I tend to lean toward thunderbolt devices. If you're working with a V, C, H D or H 0.2 64 files a USB three and a Thunderbolt devices single drive is probably to be about the same, but the actual design of the USB protocol is designed for smaller files. The design of thunderbolt is designed for larger files and for many work flows, especially in smaller format. Codex probably won't make a difference. USB drives maybe less expensive because the engineering is slightly less. Um, I've standardized on Thunderbolt because that way I don't have to worry about it. But USB three is not. It is not bad. It is not as efficient gym in a clarification question, just on that please from Cliff Cheney. Does USB three have the same sustained rate problems as previous USB standards? A good question, and I don't know the answer. I use USB on Leah's, a data transfer mechanism, but not for editing. So I'll use a USB drive to transfer from one computer to another. But I don't use it for editing, so it may. It may not. I don't have an answer, Okay, and maybe you'll have one for dangerous dame. Is every drive 120 megabits per second? Well, let's not dance on the head of a pin too closely here. Some drives, maybe a little bit slower. Some drives, maybe a little bit faster. Some drive manufacturers to differentiate themselves, are accelerating drive performance by building in flash memory into the drive, which means that it's cashing some of the information from the drive in a very, very high speed flash, which is going to give you a burst of speed and drive speeds, air gradually increasing over time. So I think it's a generally true statement to say that spinning media non flash accelerated hard drives are in the 100 to 120 megabyte of second category. It will be closer to 1 20 then say 200. It'll be closer than 1 days to 60. So in that range. But if it's 122 or or 100 or 101 105 don't yell at me, it's a range. What I'm trying to emphasize is that the number of drives that you have attached to your computer affects performance regardless of how it's connected. Yes, sir. Great on then. This one is from Derek. Should I create a separate partition on my hard drive? One for boot up, another just for editing. What? Ah, great question. And now let's think about this for a second. Okay? You ready? Jim? This is going to require some manual dexterity from you. Yes, sir. All right. This this is the hard drive. What? We have is this is the entire storage of the hard drive. Okay, now, if we create a partition, we now have one side of the hard drive the other side of the hard drive. But there's the hard drive. I've divided it into two chunks. Okay, I have exactly one head on the hard drive, not to not 10 just one. So what happens is if that not just how many places can that had be at one time, one place. You are so quick. I tell you, it leaves me breathless. You're absolutely right. One place. So what happens is in order for the If the operating system is here and the data is here, what happens is the hard drive heads need to go to the partition map to figure out where the partition is, go to the DIS directory and then go to the data. Then it's got to get the data goes. The partition map goes to this directory, gets the data. We've added an extra step, and there's only one head so it could be on the boots side or could be on the data side. But it can't be both if I have to. Hard drives here. One boot drive in one day to drive. I've got one head over here for the boot drive. I've got a second head over here for the data drive. They could be operating independently and be in two different places at the same time. Because I've got one set heads for the boot. One set heads for the data partitions used to be useful. And they're still useful when I have, say, an OS 10 8 partition and an OS 10 9 partition and I want to boot from one side of the other side. But they're not useful. When I want to have the operating system and the data access from the same head on the same drive, it slows stuff down I'm spent. Is that not a good a good explanation? Did that not make it clear to someone like yourself? That was really good. Are you up for a clarification question? Yep. This is from John Bug. Just want to clarify. To use the raid five system, you need to get 4 to 5 external drives. Question. There's two ways that you can do. One is you buy a single unit which is called a rain companies like promised technology G technology. Cal Digit Akechi Oh, I there's a bunch of folks that make rates. It's a single box that have multiple drives in it. Since you put multiple drives inside a single box, it is by definition, a raid that's the easiest. It's the best it's designed to work that way. You can also have a bunch of separate units, all connected via thunderbolt to your computer, and you'd use disk utility to build a raid from those stand alone units. The second works. My preference is buying a system that's designed from the beginning to have multiple hard drives working inside the same box. Really, thank you. And one last question from one of our favorite regulars, Cayenne and New Orleans is pro rez, a lossy format. I'm concerned when round tripping between final cut pro 10 and other external APS, each rendering and back to final cut pro I'm am I losing resolution with each render into pro rest? No, it is a loss eat co deck. On the other hand, imagine if you will imagine if you will, that I'm standing next to a bubbling mountain brook and in my hand I hold a plastic one cup measuring cup, and in that bubbling mountain brook is the water's bubbling down. I dipped into the brook, and I've now got a plastic one cup measuring cup filled to the brim filled to the brim with what used to be bubbling Mountain Brook water. Now into that plastic measuring cup by poor in some spices, importance and food coloring. And I stirred all around with great vigor and enthusiasm. And there's water splashing out all over that plastic measuring cup. Now my plastic measuring cup, which used to be full, is only 3/4 full because some was splashed out as I'm adding all these culinary effects now instead, imagine I'm standing next to the bubbling mountain brook. I dip in the plastic measuring cup, and I hold a full cup of off water of what used to be bubbling mountain brook water in this plastic measuring cup when I pour it into a five gallon bucket, and now I stir and I add, and I'm mixing with waters flying in all directions. But there's so little water in such a big bucket. Aiken, do whatever culinary effects I want, and I'm not going to lose the drop when I'm done. Mixing it all up by now poured back into that one cup plastic measuring cup in its filled to the brim with now fully affected beautiful soup that I've made, starting with that one cup of mountain water. Same thing with Codex. If you're shooting ABC HD or you're shooting h 0.2 64 you're shooting video that squeezes reality and puts it into a one cup measuring cup. If I work with that one cup measuring cup and start around, I'm gonna lose a bunch of stuff. But when I converted by pouring it into a probe rez environment, pro rez is such a bigger environment compared to what I shot to begin with. I've got all kinds of room inside the pro rest Kodak to do whatever I want. Then when I pour it back out again because I'm working in such a large space, I don't lose anything in particular. Yeah, there's a little bit of water that sticks to the side of the bucket, but compared what I could have lost by mixing directly inside that one cup measuring cup. I lose so little in comparison with working in the original format that it makes sense to move to pro rez and do all of my editing inside an optimized format. So is pro rez lossy? The answer's yes, Apple describes. It is visually lossless. But it's such a big environment to begin with that although it takes 237 megabytes of source HD and converts it down to 18 megabytes, it's still converting into much more efficient, much more powerful way than taking that 237 megabytes converting it down to three, which is what ABC HD does. So isn't lossy, yes, but it's such a much bigger environment in which to do our editing and do our effects that working inside progress actually makes a great deal of sense. I want to talk about making money for just a bit. Ah, workflow keeps us organized and avoids wasting time. Ah, hobby is something we do for the fun of it, because we enjoy the process. Whether we actually get done or not is irrelevant. Many people shoot home movies because they want to edit the home movies to tell stories of their kids as they grow up. I have hundreds of hours of my kids growing up, which I have never edited into a single movie. But I shot the home movie, and at some point I will. I'm sure edit that home movie, but really, I'm having so much fun taking picture of the kids. Whether I get this movie done or not is irrelevant just to go back and look at those source movies and say, Wow, they really did look like that when they were younger is as much fun. It's actually sitting down and editing it. But a profession is something we do to pay the rent. Now. This could be something we enjoy doing, but at the end of the day, we need to make money. I was thinking of the conversation between Lacey and Jim this morning in the pre show. Lacey was describing the independent film market. It's an environment where you do it for the love because you're certainly not get paid. How do we make the transition between doing something for the love of it and getting paid? We have to finish the job with the shooting that you're doing, Philip, if you went out and shot and never delivered the master. How often do you get employed? Probably never. Probably not ever. You gotta deliver. You got to finish it. That's what a workflow is. Ah, Workflow helps us to stay organized and avoid wasting time with a profession. The only way that we get paid is to complete a project on budget on deadline and of the client's satisfaction. Jim, efficiency is everything. Have you ever done a job put? Put your art director hat on for just a second. Have you ever done a job? And you could make it better, But the client is happy. Absolutely. OK, At what point do you deliver the job when you're happy with it or when the client is happy with it when I'm happy with it when you're happy with it, even if it takes you an extra week to get it done. Even if the client isn't paying you for that extra week, even if you have to turn down other work, you're gonna get that job until you're happy with it. Even if the client was satisfied two weeks ago within some some reason. But yeah, okay, I would argue that that's a mistake. Yeah, I kind of, I kind of, you know, extra day or two. I might I don't think I would go as far as you just said an extra week. Clients happy? Yeah, no way. But every job that you've delivered, you could make better. I mean, I can't think of a single job except one segment from which no video tape exists. I've only directed one segment that I thought was perfect. Perfect. Every shot, every angle, every everything was perfect. Everything else I could make better. I think it was made perfect because there's no record of it was really the reason that it's perfect. And it was done about 40 years ago. Everybody that was involved with it is dead. But it was perfect with us way too often. And I'm looking at you as a colorist at you could always tweak the color, make a little bit better. But if you miss the deadline, are you gonna get paid? If it's perfect to your satisfaction and you miss the deadline or you're gonna get paid, if it's to the client satisfaction and you make the deadline, no project has ever finished. It's only abandoned right, And the deadline is critical, and what happens is we try to make it perfect. And in trying to make a perfect we're wasting time once the client is happy, I said I support the idea that good enough. I mean, you want to have it be as good as you possibly can. You want to work to professional standards. But it's the client that decides whether it's good enough or not, which means we need to focus on getting our stuff done efficiently. As editors. All we have to sell is our time and creativity, increasingly most jobs or freelance, and we're bidding using a flat fee. This means that the more efficient we are with our time, the more projects we can tackle, which means the more money we make in the past we would sit in the edit suite in the the director would sit over our shoulder. We'd be in a very large facility to be five or six people watching us work, and they could see how every hour that we're building was spent. And if the client says will take an extra couple hours, let's make this effect better. The client is in the room with you. While you're doing that effect that's long gone, Clients say, here, deliver this on Friday and they don't come back and check until an hour before the deadline and sign off on it. Which means if we waste time getting back to Jim and his artwork, if it takes him an extra week to do a project past the deadline, that's money that he can't build for because he's building it on a flat fee. So a good workflow allows us to concentrate on the right task at the right time. It makes no sense to correct the color of a shot when you haven't even decided. If you want to use the shot in your project, correcting color may be fun. But removing that shot a few minutes later means we wasted all that color correction time, and we don't have the time toe waste. So I've created a 12 step workflow, and this is how we're gonna wrap up because I wanna have this both be the structure of your thinking and the structure of this training over the next three days. What we've spent this first session doing is planning what we want to do. Then we gather the media so we know what we've got. What do we have to shoot? What do we have to buy? What do we have to invent? Then we organize the media. We use events, favorites and keywords to get our clips under control and tracked. We build the story to the timeline here. We're just trying to get it to the timeline in my head. It's perfect. It isn't until I get the time. When you realized, oh, screen directions removed reversed Oh, that shots out of focus. Oh, actor wasn't in the shot. Oh, that was a bad mine. It isn't until I actually look at what I have to work with, that I can start to make any kind of decisions in terms of the quality, the story that I could tell we start with a rough cut and then refine it. We refine it by organizing the story, and then we trim the story. We get rid of the parts that we don't want. I call these 1st 6 steps their story creation phase. This is where we get it all together and we tell the story. This is what news is all about. Get on the site. Get shot, Get it edited to get it on the air. Don't make it perfect. Just make it be. But for the rest of us, we had what I call polishing the story phase. This is where we add transitions. We add text and effects, which takes up all available time, plus about an hour after the deadline. Effects concern always suck up more time. We then do audio editing, cleanup and mixing. We do color correction and grading. Color correction fixes a problem. Color grading gives it a look share, which means exporting the finished project and an archiving the project for future reuse. Most of the time archiving requires separate hardware. My recommendation today is lto six tape drives. It's just there too expensive. We'll talk more about that in a minute. First part of the story tell the story second polish the story. This is exactly how we're gonna be doing this training where we've spent time planning. We're now going to learn the software. We're going to gather our media with importing. We're gonna organize the media with keywords and ratings. Were gonna edit this story, learn hot editing works. Then we'll learn how to organize clips inside. The timeline will learn how to trim the clips. This is exactly the flow that we're gonna follow for the next three days because I found it's the most efficient way to work and we just don't have the time to waste.