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The Documentary has a lot of footage. Around 250 hours, to be exact, located on as many Mini-DV
tapes (1 hour for 1 tape), in a large box in my office. Actually, there's three boxes: one of undigitized
tapes, one of digitized tapes, and then a third where tapes that have been fully edited are stored for
archiving. One hour of Mini-DV tape digitizes into a 13 gigabyte file. This is why, when doing
this editing, I need as much disk space as possible.
To accomplish this, I have many drives inside USB 2.0-compatible external cases, hooked via hubs to my editing machine, a 1.5ghz computer running Windows XP. Here's what my current disk layout looks like:
"Pump and Dump", "Data Orgy", "Local Disk", "Tagwam" and "Animehell" are drives for other projects; the rest are all collections of digitized video from these tapes. If it looks like I have multiple pairs of similarly named drives (Artscene A, Artscene B), that's because they're functioning as "hot backups" of each other, kept up to date by a program I use called "Synchronize it!". These are not all the drives I have, just the ones I have connected to the machine when the screenshot was taken. In fact, the number is closer to 3,000 or 4,000 gigabytes (roughly 3 and a half terabytes). As is always the case whenever someone publically states their solution to a computer problem, I have recieved a fair amount of flak my choice of storage. An idealized situation would involve Hardware RAID arrays, maybe some dedicated server connected by one of the newer high-speed protocols, purchased in a huge bulk in anticipation of the oncoming onslaught of data. In my case, I went with USB 2.0 external add-ons for specific reasons that have borne themselves out over the past couple of years. Specifically, USB 2.0 lets me attach and detach drives at will, lets me expand the size of the space incrementally, and most importantly, is very cheap. I would never propose what I've done if it was for a customer with specific needs that they were paying me for, like reliability and constant uptime. The potential for data to "drop off" the machine for periods of time is quite high (and has done so in my experience) and disk failures can have catastrophic effects, including crashing the machine. But for my specific needs, it has worked out well. Here's what the drives look like on the shelf in my office:
The final amount of "official" footage on the DVD set will at most max out at 9 hours. 9 hours of DV video is 37 gigabytes, roughly. I suspect it will be less than that, but it's a good ballpark figure to work with. Assuming that roughly 80-90 percent of that will be interview footage, that means I have to turn 250 hours of footage into 8, a daunting task. The most space-consuming collection is composed of the unedited one-hour footage digitizations. These take the same amount of time to digitize as they run, that is, one hour of time to digitize one hour. To digitize them, I purchased a Panasonic AG-DV1000, basically a Mini-DV VCR. This is the most expensive piece of equipment I purchased outside of the camera, running me about a thousand dollars. Unlike a lot of VCRs, it has the advantage of digital out, which means once it leaves the tape, it's pretty much not going to degrade from that point on (not counting compression for a DVD). I use a laptop to digitize the tapes, and the whole setup looks like this:
The Laptop has both USB and Firewire inputs, and I end up using both for this process, going via Firewire from the Panasonic and then USB out to the drive that stores the digitized video. When digitizing using the Vegas Video Digitizer, I shut off Preview Video and Audio, since that can sometimes cause frame skipping and other problems. I know I want the whole tape and I let the machine do all the work, using my main machine for other work. Here is a collection of fully digitized tapes (18) waiting to be culled:
The video capture software (which comes with Vegas Video) names it automatically to "Clip 001" - there is no "Clip 002" unless I mess up the digitizing and restart. As I go through a given piece of footage in Vegas Video, I pull off statements made by someone and have Vegas Video "re-render" them into standalone clips. This way I have just the answers, and not me asking questions, us discussing irrelevant stuff, answer to questions ultimately not needed. This is the longest and most painful process of the editing, because I have to listen to my own mistakes over and over, as well as listen objectively to the sound and look at the final image. Sometimes the shoot is many times better than I remember, and sometimes it it many times worse. Slowly, each folder builds up with a mass of clips, each with a description I typed into the filename:
As indicated by the info box, each of these clips can be quite large in themselves; many megabytes just for 10 second statements from people. There's one file that has a ".sfk" extension: This is created by Vegas when you pull in a piece of video, so that file was used in some sort of editing already. I name the files with the person being interviewed and the statement being made. This is a bit of a crapshoot when my subject is so large, but it's the best I could come up with, and it means I have to be extra careful when sorting through the clips for the right next statement. Digitized Mini-DV video looks like this when on my machine:
That's me and Count Nibble in California, after I'd completed interviewing him. The Batteries on my digital camera went out so I just stood behind him for a moment and posed. The camera is a Canon XL-1, and takes pretty good shots in strange-light situations. In this case there are two of my professional lights in the room, one aimed at that record shelf in the back and one diffused in front of us. There's also a little bit of natural light leaking in from the windows near the couch. This page will grow and change as I get a better handle on the whole process of editing as it has worked out for me. |