At my film school we are currently finishing a project called "Koks und Cola" (Cocaine and Coke). It is a project were each filmmaker does one episode - black & white, 16:9, max 3 actors, all shot in the same toilet - that we are cutting together now. Since I am responsible for finishing the movies and compiling a dvd, I want to use this opportunity to write something about all the little details that come up in a mixed platform, highly distributed independent film making environment. So, unless you are into the technical details of film making, this post will bore the hell out of you ;).
First off we had to come up with a way to get the edited films to my computer (a PC running Win XP) so I can finish them in After Effects. For miniDV Footage this is no big deal since QT/Avis with DV Codec can be saved from most editing software with a minimal amount of recompression (if you switch off "recompress" or "recompress all frames", only the frames that change have to be recompessed, e.g. the fade-ins and -outs) and even recompressing the movie again is not that bad. However, quite a few of us shot using the Sony FX1 HDV Camera, and the one thing you don't want to do is recompress HDV Footage with the HDV Codec just to get it to After Effects. Since it does not store each frame on its own but a keyframe every 12 or 25 frames and then only the differences, even a simple hard cut leads to recompression, and since the resolution is about 6 times bigger with the same datarate, even a 2nd generation can copy can get pretty ugly.
So, what we do is we use the quicktime container and the PNG Codec (which is lossless but compresses the movie quite significantly) to get the HDV Movies into AE. Some of my fellow students were quite surprised to see export times of a few hours for 3-5 minutes of film, but considering the amount of data the poor computers have to munch through it's not so bad - high resolution comes at a price and the PNG Compression, while great for image fidelity, is certainly not the fastest.
Now after they rendered out the movie there comes the next little problem - how do you get files of 14 GB from a mac onto a pc? The easy way would be putting them onto an external harddrive, but my pc cannot read mac formatted disks and a mac cannot read NTFS (Win xp) formatted disks. Which leaves the possibility of a FAT32 formatted partition. Luckily I thought of this case when I bought my last external harddrive and kept a 40 GB Partition in FAT32. However, and this one is really annoying, FAT32 cannot store files bigger than 4 Gigs. So, we have to split them up. But, how do we do that? By opening a Terminal under Mac OS X and writing the command:
tar -c -L 4000000 --file=/OUTPUTFILENAME INPUTFILENAME
This will create a new file outputfilename and stop when it reaches 4 gigs. Then it will ask you to insert a new tape (stupid tar), so you rename the file to make room for a new 4 Gig junk and so on until you have several 4 Gig junks that you can reassemble on your pc.
Why go through all this trouble instead of using a network? Well, that means reconfiguring a Mac which is something I don't really like doing since I don't know them a lot and I hate to be responsible when things don't work anymore.
But, there is another alternative of course that I am considering at the moment: Getting MacDrive 6 . This lets you Windows PC access Mac formatted disks - quite useful when this case comes up more often.
So much for my current adventures of data wrangling. More to come soon! Yeehaaa!