Tutorial - How to Archive Canon HDSLR Footage
I admit it. I'm swept up in the new video tech craze that is Canon SLR shooting. It's incredible the shallow depth of field in combo with a nice big HD image you can get out of this new breed of cameras. I love it. Anyone can pick up a camera for less than a couple grand (really even less than a grand) and make very pretty movies with some knowledge. The area that I have found that is lacking is knowledge of proper workflow with the Canon 7D, 5D Mark II, 60D, and T2i. Once upon a time we would all shoot on video tape. Then we would digitize or capture the tape data onto our computers using a deck or the camera we shot it on. Then the tape went back to the shelf seldom to be touched again. The only times we would touch the tape again would be to online the footage with a better codec or to do a re-edit. Well, these tape days are pretty much over. But hey where is our backup footage on the shelf?
With the transition to tapeless media it is crucial to understand the new proper footage backup process. Here is a workflow that has worked very well for me this past year making the plunge into specifically - Canon DSLR footage.. This process is Mac specific.
Copy ALL contents of your flash card to your hard drive in a new folder. It is crucial that every folder (this does include DCIM, MISC and all of the others that are empty). All files and folders are important.
Rename that outermost folder to a useful "Reel" name. This should be unique and never duplicated in any of your other projects in the past or future. I use a method that is very systematic. If I was archiving a card from a shoot today it would get the name, "110318_CF001", the first 6 digits are the date going year, month, day. This is important to follow this order because things you shoot in January of 2012 will still come after this in alpha numeric order. The last part "CF001" is just another way to chronologically number all of your "reels". To keep track of what is on what archive I use Google spreadsheets and it works well.
Open up Disk Utility. The quickest way that I do this is by tapping, command+spacebar to launch spotlight in the upper right corner. Start typing "disk utility" and hit enter when it appears. Now we want to create a disk image of the archived "reel" folder we just made in the last step. Click File -> New -> Disk Image from Folder. Now select the folder you made in the last step and leave the file name as it was "110318_CF001" for example. Save it to an external hard drive that preferably only has Canon footage disk images stored on it. Leave the image format as compressed and encryption to none (no changes needed there). Click "save".
That's it! You did it. A proper archive of your Canon HDSLR footage using only the mac os and built in disk utility.
Get some coffee, because this will take a while. Depending on how large a card it might take 20 minutes or it might take an hour or so. Just let it run.
The benefit of going through this somewhat time consuming process is two-fold. On one hand it provides you with an equivalent to an old school tape backup that you can then store on the shelf. On the second hand it is the ONLY WAY to properly relink missing media to a Final Cut Pro project or perform and online edit in the future (in conjunction with the Canon E-1 plugin). By creating a disk image before you injest into Final Cut Pro you create a "reel" path that is not absolute (meaning that it lives in this folder in this sub directory of your system). A disk image is independent of a path since it sits on the root and therefore is perfect for transcoding into Final Cut Pro to edit.
In a future tutorial I will go more in depth on ways to work with the Canon E-1 plugin from your backup disk image. Thanks for making it to the end of my first tutorial on ChadwickPaul.net.
