Before we had our African Premiere of BROWNSTONES TO RED DIRT, this was the view from the theater.  It was the rainy season in Salone so these beautiful clouds were ever present.  Clay perfectly captured the feeling of the night.  The composition is also great, the canoe dead center in frame really helps the shot have balance.

These kids showed up out of nowhere to play a game of pick up football for us.  They ran around so joyful and full of life.  This kid is checking out Dave who is on the ground just out of frame getting a shot of him in net.

The weather during the rainy season in Salone is amazing.  This shot to me is like a painting.  Separated into three quadrants – three different tones.  Water, sky, clouds.  Something about this picture really draws me in.  I can’t stop looking at it.  I love it!

Stretching out before the pickup game of football.  The kids were so cute.  They really took these games quite seriously.  I think this shot really captures that.

Soccer games on Lumley Beach are intense!  The player in the red shorts is in the midst of a slide tackle here.  Again, I love the details:  The sand being kicked up.  The fact that one player has shoes, the other doesn’t.  The waves in the background.  I was shooting video of this play at the time and whenever I look at this picture I can’t help put complete the action of the slide tackle in my mind.

When we shot BROWNSTONES TO RED DIRT we used all natural light for the interviews. Gorgeous!  I love the reflection in Mohammed’s eyes.  We saw him on a later trip to Salone and it was as if we never left.  He walked right up to us and took our hands (a common gesture among boys in Salone showing friendship).  I cannot wait to go back to Salone and see him and the other kids.

Everywhere you look, kids are playing football. I love how Clay captured the ball flying through the air. Details!  This ball is much different than the one used during the Lumley Beach games.  More beat up, deflated slightly.  The kids wear sandals as the ground is much harder and riddled with rocks (although some don’t).  The kid in the foreground is the keeper about to save the shot.  The rock in the lower left hand corner of the frame is actually one of the goal markers.

The view of Freetown from the hills always takes my breath away.  On this clear day, you could see almost the entire city.  Look at the guys on the roof!

The play the kids from BROWNSTONES TO RED DIRT put on about the rebel invasion in Salone will also stick with me forever. Clay totally captured its intensity in this shot.

*All photos shot with Canon EOS Rebel XS with either Canon 28-90mm or Canon EFS 18-55mm lenses

With BROWNSTONES TO RED DIRT, we didn’t set out to make a movie for kids.  We did, however, try to make a movie that was accessible to children.

If you haven’t seen BROWNSTONES (we’ll forgive you—but only if you buy the DVD immediately!), there are some pretty heavy scenes.  As we edited the film, we never thought, “Hey, maybe we should temper this so it will play to kids.”

We did make one decision to make BROWNSTONES more enjoyable for kids: we tried to cut out as many adults as possible.  Though we had some pretty compelling interviews with expert authors Daniel Bergner (In the Land of Magic Soldiers), Charles London (One Day the Soldiers Came) and Ishmael Beah (the New York Times bestseller A Long Way Gone), we felt it made more sense for the audience to experience the stories in the film through their eyes of the children that lived them, rather than through the lens of an adult interpreting their experience.

For the first few festivals we took the film to, we played to mainly adult audiences where the questions were pretty standard (“Where are they now?” “Were you safe in Sierra Leone?” etc).  Then, we took the film to San Francisco where we screened exclusively to school groups.  There is nothing more intimidating than seeing a theater full of middle and high school students who we knew would be honest.  But in San Francisco, and so far here in Toronto, the kids have been remarkably responsive.  We’ve gotten great, honest questions and felt like there has been genuine interest.  We like to believe that’s because the kids in the audience are identifying with the kids in the film.

It’s become clear that there’s a difference between making a kid’s film and making a film that’s accessible to kids.  We never expected gaggles of teens to go out on a Friday night and see BROWNSTONES instead of The Hunger Games, but one of our mantras throughout the process was that if a teacher showed our film during class, the kids wouldn’t be bored.  But throughout the festival run, kids have repeatedly been our most engaged audiences.   Here’s hoping our final screening in Toronto will live up to the first two…

When we shot our short documentary KEI we had no idea how crazy the experience was going to be.  Check it out!

Scope of the project.

How big are you going and what are you looking to get out of the crowdsourcing effort.  For us, this is something that is paramount to consider.  We are going to be utilizing this campaign not only to raise funds but also to raise awareness.  Our project is fairly large.  We are creating a feature length documentary about a living legend and the budget is fairly large in comparison to many of the projects you’d find on either site.  The money raised will be a supplement the traditional financing that we’ve secured but will still be a fairly large amount.

Know Your Potential Audience.

How many people do you need to reach and who are they?  Something to be considered is who will be interested in your project and which site will they likely be visiting.  There is obviously no clear cut way to figure this stuff out but based on our observational research niche projects abound on both sites but Kickstarter seems to draw in the bigger projects.  This is likely due to their impressive site traffic.  It isn’t uncommon for over 400,000 people to visit Kickstarter in any given day providing over 2,000,000 page views.   Kickstarter being one of the first to market also has name recognition and as mentioned already, has made a name for itself in our industry by helping out very legitimate film projects.  This is not to diminish IndieGoGo’s place in the market however.  They are squarely aimed at the independent industry but don’t yet have the mass brand recognition that Kickstarter has.

So who did we choose?

Drum roll please…

We chose Kickstarter.  As you might have been able to glean from the slight bias above, we feel that at this point, with this particular project, Kickstarter makes the most sense.  We like their all or nothing model because we feel it gives backers the confidence that they are backing legitimate projects that will be completed.  While Kickstarter’s fee are potentially a little higher, we feel that the brand recognition, site traffic and reach of the website will make up for that.  Also, because of the scale of this project, we’re looking to raise a good amount of funds and reach a large, diverse audience, Kickstarter is a good match.  Since we’re in the middle of this process, I can’t tell you if we choose wisely or not but we’ll certainly get into that as the campaign gets under way.

So now what?

Believe it or not, that was the easy part.  Choosing a partner is only the tip of the iceberg.  Regardless of who you choose to go with, now comes the hard work of determining your desired fundraising goal.  Figuring what it would take in terms of backers to achieve that goal.  Creating, pricing and sourcing the rewards that you’ll offer your backers.  Not to mention, starting to plan how you are going to get your project out to the world.  It doesn’t matter if you choose Kickstarter or IndieGoGo, if all you do is put up a post on their site and hope to get funded you’re doomed to come up short.

We’ve been working on our plan now for almost a year now and next time we’ll get into goal setting, marketing, campaign planning and all that other fun stuff you’ll need to do to make this dream a reality.

At the end of last week, we had the pleasure of meeting Ryan Roe and Joe Hennes of Tough Pigs, a fansite that describes itself as “Muppet fans who grew up.”  They had joined us for a screening of BROWNSTONES TO RED DIRT and, undoubtedly of more interest to them, a preview of our next documentary, I AM BIG BIRD.  Joe and Ryan shared our website with their fans on Friday morning and since then, we’ve heard from tons of Muppet fans.  There are LOTS of questions and we’re here to answer some of the more common ones we received:

WHEN CAN I SEE THIS?
Great question.  Right now, we’re in the midst of production.  We’re targeting a mid-late 2013 festival run with a nationwide theatrical release to follow.

OK, SO WHY ARE YOU TELLING ME ABOUT THIS NOW?
You guys ask great questions!  As you must know, making films costs lots of money.  One of the ways we are financing and promoting the film is through the use of Kickstarter.  Kickstarter is a crowd-sourcing website that helps artists raise money from individuals in exchange for products or experiences and has not only helped raise $45 million for film projects, but also financed three documentaries on the Academy Award shortlist this year.  It has truly become a great way for documentaries to get made.  When we launch the campaign in the upcoming months, its success is going to rely entirely on the mobilization of the Muppet fanbase and thankfully, we have loads of cool incentives to get the ball rolling.  We’ll be announcing all of them at a later date, but we can say that among them will be a copy of the film (essentially a pre-order), an original illustration by Caroll and an opportunity for a group video chat with Caroll.

WHERE CAN I SEE THIS?
LOTS of people have said that they want to see this in their local theater.  We can’t release details yet, but we’re in discussions with several distributors.  We promise you this: we’re doing our part to make sure it gets the widest release possible.  Of course, for those that want to guarantee they’ll get to see it, the Kickstarter campaign will offer a chance to pre-order the film.

WHO’S MAKING THE FILM?
Copper Pot Pictures is made up of Clay Frost, Chad Walker and Dave LaMattina.  Chad & Dave are going to direct and produce together with Clay also on producing duties.  You can read more about their background HERE, but know this: they love Muppets (and Dave interned at Sesame Workshop back in the day).

WHAT AM I GOING TO SEE?
Caroll and his wife Deb are amazing archivists.  There is no way we can possibly list all the amazing stuff we have here, but some of our favorites that they’ve shared with us include behind-the-scenes footage (shot by Deb) from Follow That Bird, Big Bird in China and A Muppet Family Christmas.  The stuff is unreal.

HOW WILL THIS PARALLEL “BEING ELMO?”
We love Being Elmo.  The truth is that when we first reached out to Sesame Workshop in June of 2009, the first thing they said to us was that the delightful Constance Marks had already been working on a Kevin Clash documentary for several years.  The revelation didn’t deter us.  We looked at it, as we do many things, through the lens of a sports analogy.  Just because someone made a documentary about Roger Maris doesn’t mean there shouldn’t be one about Mickey Mantle: sure their time in pinstripes overlapped, but their lives, careers and accomplishments were vastly different.  We felt the same applied here.

WAIT, WHAT DO YOU MEAN WHEN YOU SAY CAROLL IS “THE LAST OF THE ORIGINAL SESAME PUPPETEERS?”
Some of the more astute Muppet fans have pointed to the line in our trailer that cites Caroll as the last of the original Sesame Street puppeteers.  They cite the work of legends like Fran Brill and Jerry Nelson, both of whom still work with the show, and, of course, Frank Oz, who is synonymous with the Muppets.  We are fans of all of their work (and every other name bandied about).  But, as filmmakers, we are drawn to the fact that Caroll was one of the three puppeteers on the first season of the show (the other two obviously being Mr. Oz and Jim Henson).  Ms. Brill and Mr. Nelson’s tenure began in the second year, so that’s what we meant when referring to “original.”  Mr. Oz does still occasionally perform on the show, but, as the Muppet fans surely know, Caroll is a regular performer.  Our intent wasn’t to overlook these (and other) remarkable Sesame Street puppeteers, rather, the line in the trailer was meant to be a tip of the cap to Caroll’s Ripken-esque run on the show.  But thanks to the fans for keeping us honest!

NOW, A QUESTION FROM US!
Since we started this production, we’ve frequented Muppet message boards and websites–not as posters, just as observers.  We know the passion that people feel for Sesame Street.  It’s crucial to us that we get this film right.  We want to make sure it’s the film that fans want to see.  We want to shed new light on Caroll’s remarkable life and show you even more reason to love the man behind the bird.  So please, keep emailing us, keep posting questions and let us know what you want to see.  We want this to be an interactive process that engages the fans throughout the making of the picture.  Get in touch!  What do you want to see? Hit us up HERE.

Today I’ll only talk about our workflow in Final Cut Pro, although there are similar things you can do in other editing software.

Once we have delivered a project, I click on our FINALED Sequence and right click.  From the drop down menu, I select MEDIA MANAGER (aptly named).

The Media Manager window pops up.  From here you can see the original amount of media that was used, in our case 175 GB, and also your new amount once you’ve consolidated everything, in our case 79 GB.  Pretty impressive!

From here you can customize exactly what/how you want to consolidate.  Under MEDIA, I always select COPY.  I want NEW media created that my NEW project will reference.

I do not have INCLUDE RENDERS ticked because I don’t want to waste the storage space with render files.  If I need to bring this project back online I will just re-render at that time.

I like to tick INCLUDE MASTER CLIPS OUTSIDE OF SELECTION.  Basically, what this means is you will copy the entire master clip.  If you are really hurting for space you can un-tick this.  Then, only the media that is actually being used in your cut will get copied.  If I un-tick this, my new media amount goes from 79 GB to 36 GB, a significant drop.

Make sure to have DELETE UNUSED MEDIA FROM DUPLICATED ITEMS ticked.  If you don’t, you will be basically copying all your media!!!

The other important option in here is to make sure you have Duplicate selected items and place into a new project ticked.  What this means is FCP will actually create a new PROJECT that only includes your FINALED sequence and all the media associated with it.  And that is really all we want.

Then, just select a MEDIA DESTINATION where you want the NEW media to live.

Once you hit OK, pick a name and location for you new consolidated project.

BOOM!!!  Watch FCP work its magic!

What you will be left with is a new project with a folder containing all of your master clips.

Ready to blow away all the original media?  Not so fast!!!  Slow down, don’t do it yet!!!

THIS IS THE MOST IMPORTANT PART!!!

Make sure to take your original FCP Project File and copy it to the same location as your new Consolidated Project File.  Then you can blow away all your media away.

“Why?” you might ask.

“Well,” I might say, “What if you need some of the media you blew away.  For a Behind-the-Scenes featurette, or someone wants a shot you didn’t use?”

“Great question, continue.”

“All you have to do is open up your original FCP Project file –“

“But Chad, all my clips will be offline because you told me to delete all my unused media?!”

“You are correct, but as long as you kept all your RAW camera files (tapeless workflow) or/and all your tapes (tape based workflow) then all you have to do is batch capture the clips you want and they will all come back online.”

And there it is, it all comes together!  Parts 1-3!

I cannot emphasize enough the importance of managing your media – from shooting, ingestion to consolidating.  Remember, to be a quality editor you have to be both creative and OCD.  And to emphasize this, you better make sure your consolidated project and media are on a RAIDED G-Tech ES PRO eSata drive!  And then put that thing in a waterproof, fireproof safe!

Final cut is a thorny issue and one that has come up on almost every documentary project we’ve ever worked on.  It’s understandable, of course.  Documentaries feature real stories and, more importantly, real people.  Honestly, if someone was making a documentary about me or my family, I’d insist that we have final cut.  And I’m sure the filmmaker would insist we didn’t.

You’ll find that different filmmakers are more comfortable with different arrangements.  I’ve read that two shows which I truly enjoyed and admired, HBO’s 24/7: Road to the Winter Classic and On Freddie Roach, both traded final cut for amazing access.  As a viewer, I don’t feel the product suffered.  Both shows seemed honest and offered unparalleled insights into their subjects.  I certainly didn’t find myself wondering what the filmmakers were forced to cut because of their agreements–it all seemed to be on the screen.

But because that isn’t always the case, final cut isn’t something we’re comfortable giving away.  It’s, as they say, a slippery slope.  If you’re making a film about an up-and-coming band that requires final cut for you to tell their story, at what point does your film cease becoming a documentary and start becoming a commercial?  When you’ve invested years and hundreds of thousands of dollars into a project, do you really want your film to be altered because a guitarist doesn’t like the inclusion of his coke-fueled rage that nearly broke up the band?

On every project we’ve worked on, we’ve retained final cut, but not without substantial discussions with the subject.   Of course, who retains final cut is not an easy conversation, especially if you’re at a point in your negotiations where you are obtaining life rights.  As that’s one of the first parts of the process, your subject doesn’t know you well and has no reason to trust you yet.  If it’s a high profile subject or a hot topic, you’re probably not the only team in the mix pitching yourself to tell that person’s story.  Other filmmakers may be offering final cut, so the onus is on you to prove yourself trustworthy if you want to retain it.  How do you do that?

You need to be honest with them.  Obviously, docs change and evolve throughout the course of production, but you need to explain your vision of the film.   If there’s a controversial or surprising element to your take on the subject, you should be up front with them.  Don’t try to hide the drama of the story.  You’re asking a lot of your subjects, they deserve to know what you’re thinking.

We’ve also found that it helps to explain our position on the matter of final cut itself.  We tell them we believe docs are a longform journalistic endeavor and giving away final cut creates the potential for our work to be negated.  We also offer a chance to review the cut at three stages: the rough cut, the fine cut and the final cut.  By doing so, we believe that the subject won’t ever be caught off guard by anything he or she sees on screen.  We’ll have the chance to discuss our portrayal of their story throughout the filmmaking process.  If they see things one way, we can explain our position and listen to theirs.  More often than not, the truth lies somewhere between our differing perceptions of the issue at hand and the cut resulting from our debate is a more truthful portrayal.  We believe this sort of dialogue should be carried out throughout the making of the film.

These lessons are learned from that first experience on BROWNSTONES TO RED DIRT.  Essentially, we explained our position and asked plainly for their trust.  Thankfully, they gave it to us.  We were able to film that day and we established a relationship with the community that continues still today.  It’s important to remember the subject’s perspective in all this–you’re asking for the right to portray the life as you see fit.  Shouldn’t they trust you?

Absolutely not.

But I had to.

I’m far enough removed from film school to look back and evaluate whether or not it was worth it.  For me, there’s no question: it was a necessary step in my development and one I wish I took even more advantage of.

My path to film school was fairly straightforward.  I graduated from Boston College with a major in Communications and a minor in Film Studies.  I had made one 40-minute documentary (which I still love, but, in fairness, is probably a solid 15-18 minutes too long) and done a summer workshop at the New York Film Academy where I made super-serious student films shot and edited on 16-mm black and white film.  I thought I was the full package.  I even rocked filmmaker glasses.

I was promptly denied admission to all of my top choice film schools, except for one, the University of Southern California School for Cinema-Television (since renamed the School for Cinematic Arts).  There are tons of books and blogs out there that compare the schools and talk about what each offers, so I’m not going to get into that.  I’ll just jump into why I needed film school.

What I appreciated most about film school was it allowed me to focus my attention on making movies and develop habits that would last well beyond my classes.  When I graduated, I was hotly pursuing a writing career.  In school, I had the time to dedicate to write for at least an hour a day.  That very simple habit carried over to my first post-graduate job as a director’s assistant.  So, yes, I graduated from film school to get coffee, but hardly a day went by when I wasn’t writing.  As I turned my attention back to docs, that writing time became development and research time.  I can very easily trace the beginnings of this all-important habit to my time at USC.

Film school costs a lot of money.  A lot of filmmakers—good ones—argue that you can just sink your tuition into making your own feature, which is absolutely true.  BUT… that suggests that your first feature is going to be worthy of that money.  The beauty of film school is that it is a period of safe incubation.  You can make your first horrible student film.  And your second.  And your third.  Your films may not be horrible, but mine were (and if I ever decide to drop the coin to transfer them to digital, I promise I’ll share them so you can see what I mean).  I wasn’t ready to make good films—I hadn’t figured out what I wanted to say or how to say it.  Spending time surrounded by mostly supportive peers offered me a chance to find that.  I quickly realized that the super serious fare of my NY Film Academy days (wait, that crack-smoking, hooker-hiring man is actually revealed to be a priest—shocking… and deep!) wasn’t what I wanted to pursue.

I also headed off to film school determined to be a director, which I think is a pretty standard goal of everyone that enrolls.  But I quickly determined that I wouldn’t be the next Dawson Leery (that reference should date me appropriately).  Turns out, when I was directing actors that weren’t my friends, I didn’t particularly care for it.  I did, however, discover a love of writing and producing.  This story is echoed by tons of students that, for, whatever reason, find that they want to edit or be cinematographers or do one of a hundred other jobs they’re exposed to in school.

Having worked on the indie scene for a while now, I’ll say that even if you do decide to forego film school and spend tuition money on your first feature, I can tell you that you’re going to be hustling for every last resource.   I can’t knock the hustle—it’s an invaluable skill.  But if you’re directing your first feature, do you really want to be concerned about where the edit suite is going to come from?  Or how you can persuade your college roommate’s sister’s boyfriend who’s a supervisor at Post Works to cut you a deal on color correct?  There’s plenty of time for that.  Film school lets you worry less about that and more about honing the basic skills you need to tell a story.

While it’s a safe place, it’s also a place where you have to learn to take criticism.  I can’t speak for other schools, but at USC, the director has to show his or her film, then sit in a circle without speaking while everyone in the class makes their comment.  It’s not easy.  But it’s one of the most valuable things I learned in school.  Even today, Chad, Clay and I don’t always agree on our internal notes.  But that peer beatdown taught me how to absorb notes and not shut out good feedback.

It’s worth mentioning, even if only in a line, that the connections you make at school will pay dividends down the line.  The school will tell you this—especially USC, where they hawk their famous alumni at every chance (and rightly so, the list is impressive).  But it’s true—school is an introduction to networking, a skill that might not come so readily on the front lines of your first indie.

Finally, film schools want you to succeed.  It reflects well on the school and guarantees alumni donations for years to come.  The schools are investing in their students and banking on their success.

The decision to go to film school is a highly personal one—for me, it was a necessary step that helped me shape habits that have served me well as an independent producer/director.  In a future post, I’ll talk about how to get the most out of school once you’re there.

Some may be shocked to find that a tape-based workflow and a tapeless workflow are pretty much identical with a few exceptions.

The process still starts in the camera, only instead of loading in tapes to our camera, we are loading in P2 Cards or SDHC cards, etc.

IMPORTANT NOTE 1: If your memory card is new, you must REFORMAT IT.  There is software that you can download to do this, but I recommend doing it in your camera.

IMPORTANT NOTE 2: If your memory card is not new and has footage on it, make sure you’ve copied the footage off the card (see below).  Once you’ve done that, you’ll need to REFORMAT the card again.  I recommend doing this in the camera.

IMPORTANT NOTE 3: Not all memory cards are created equal.  For example, SDHC cards have different classes or different speeds.  If you have a camera that can shoot variable frame rates like we do (Panasonic AF100), you’ll need a card that is at least class 6 or above.  Classes or speeds of cards go all the way up to 10.  With that in mind, not all cameras can use all different classes of cards so make sure you have the correct class of card for your camera and your shooting needs.

Once your card is REFORMATED and in the camera, we still set our Timecode to 01:00:00:00 for the first card.   Now, at this point, the workflow is a little different.  On a 32-gig memory card, recording full 1080/24p HD allows you to record over 3 hours of footage on some cameras (depending on camera compression).  The need to stop every hour is eliminated because we are no longer restricted by the length of a tape.  For most shoots, you’ll only use one card, so you can just let your TC run.  If you have an all day shoot, you can choose to just let the TC run for all your cards.  But what I like to do, if I’ve recorded for 2 hours on one card and have a break to switch cards, I’ll then start with the next hour.  In this example, it would be hour 3.   This is just a personal preference.

Now, the next question is, what do we do once our card is filled or we have a break to switch cards?

We are usually in the field so we bring along a laptop, a card reader and a dedicated hard drive.  Gone are the days of having to store your tapes in a waterproof, fire proof safe for eternity.  Now you can store all your raw camera footage on hard drives, which are much smaller and much easier to store.  (I’ll discuss the huge issue of backing up these files in a second).

Once we are done shooting we’ll take the card out of our camera, put the card into our card reader and boom, it pops up on our desktop.  Then I follow the same exact naming scheme that I would use for my tape workflow.  Only now I create folders with those names.  So…at the end of the day we are left with a series of folders on my dedicated hard drive that look like this,

1. 020212_CAMA_001
2. 020212_CAMA_002
3. 020212_CAMA_003
4. 020212_CAMB_001
5. 020212_CAMB_002
6. 020212_CAMB_003
7. 020212_CAMC_001
8. 020212_CAMC_002
9. 020212_CAMC_003

This of course is an example of a multi-camera, multi-card shoot.

Now you are back in your office/edit with a hard drive full of raw camera footage.  We all know hard drives fail.  So what to do – we want this raw footage forever, right?  What we do is copy the raw footage from our dedicated field hard drive to a RAIDed drive that lives in our edit.  We use a 12 gig G-Tech Es Pro eSata drive.  Once a project is done, we store this rather compact drive in a waterproof, fireproof safe.  It’s way more space efficient than hundreds of tapes!

Now you have all of your raw camera footage copied on multiple drives.  You’re feeling good.  At this point, instead of digitizing your footage like you would do with a tape based workflow, we now have to TRANSCODE the footage so we can work with it in our edit program.

You’ll notice that you can’t play your raw files in your edit program or even in Quicktime player for that matter.  What you’ll have to do (and we’ll only talk about Final Cut Pro at this point) is open FCP, then open the “Log and Transfer” window (you’ll need FCP 7 or higher to have this option).  Here, you can simply drop one of your dated camera folders on the window and BOOOOOMM!  All of your clips you shot on that card will show up!

What is great about this is that FCP automatically fills in the REEL column with your folder name.  So if you were the type of editor that would just put in “lklj;lkj;jk;lkj” as your tape, now FCP automatically does it for you, keeping you much more organized.  “Thanks, FCP!”  “You’re welcome, unorganized-disaster-waiting-to-happen-editor.”

Now you go in and start logging your clips – it’s the exact same process as with a tape-based workflow but with a slightly different look.  You can still set your in and out points for each clip, add a comment, etc.

And, if down the road your transcoded footage goes offline, you can easily get it back by selecting the footage, right clicking and selecting BATCH CAPTURE.  The Log and Transfer window pops up and if you haven’t moved your raw camera files, FCP should be able to find the raw camera folder and re-Transcode your file.  If you did have to move your raw camera folder or rename it, you can easily re-point to the new folder.

Again, make sure you do not have your project file on the same drive as your transcoded media because if one drive dies that has everything on it, then you are out of luck.  So… we have our project file on our computer’s hard drive, a G-Tech Es Pro eSata drive for our raw camera files and another for our transcoded files.

That about does it for a tapeless media management workflow.  Next time, we’ll look at what to do once a project is done: do you really need all those TBs of media?  Storage space doesn’t grow on trees you know!