![]() One of Catalyst Browse’s best tricks is its ability to make an identical copy of a clip - but with new In/Out points. Everyone who works with Sony footage ought to have Catalyst Browse on their computer. Catalyst has a ton of features and capabilities, but at its core it is mainly for checking dailies and looking at metadata. No other camera manufacturer has anything for customers that comes remotely close to Catalyst Browse. So, why not extract those two soundbites and throw the rest of the footage away? In other words, why back up an hours’ worth of junk (on three different drives) if a couple of minutes of footage will give you all the soundbites you need?Īn often-overlooked advantage of shooting with Sony cameras is that you are provided with a very powerful utility program for post called Catalyst Browse – and it is free. When you get back home and review the footage you realize there are only two good soundbites in the whole interview. ![]() ![]() Here's another example: Let’s say you’re shooting a long interview and the subject rambles for an hour. So, why would you waste space backing them up in post? Finally, after a dozen takes you get a couple of keepers, and there’s no question that the first ten takes are completely useless. Here's another example: Let’s say you’re working with “talent”, and they keep blowing their lines take after take. So why backup a 40-minute clip if a two-minute clip would suffice? Of which maybe only two minutes in the middle is all I care about. So, when a camera has been running at 120 fps for a few minutes, what I end up with is a 30–40-minute clip. And sometimes I won’t have a chance to stop those unmanned cameras for several minutes after the rocket has left the pad. Some of my slow-motion cameras are on locked-down shots of the pad and I must start them recording a couple of minutes before liftoff. Here's another example: I shoot many rocket launches in Florida using as many as 10 cameras. So what I like to do is only ingest, backup, and archive the best 20-30 seconds of that 2.5-minute clip. Almost every wildlife clip has one or two key moments of action, and the rest will be left on the cutting room floor. Most editors are only going to use 10-20 seconds of the bird flying - or less. If my camera is set for 23.98p and I track a bird for 30 seconds at 120 fps S&Q Motion, the result is a 2.5-minute slow-motion clip. So, instead of making three copies of 1TB of footage, I can save a lot of storage space if I only backup 500GB or 300GB of footage - all without transcoding or degrading the footage in anyway.īasically, what I’m talking about is doing a quick rough cut during ingest to throw away unneeded clips entirely, and also trimming the unneeded heads and tails of the clips that are “keepers”.įor example, I shoot a lot of wildlife in slow-motion, and that always results in some lengthy clips. Whenever possible, I like to reduce that 1TB of raw footage to 500GB, or 300GB before I make my backups. So, even though XAVC is already far more efficient than ProRes, I still like to further reduce my storage requirements in post by getting rid of material I ready know I won’t need. For example, if I bring home 1TB of footage from a shoot, suddenly that grows to 3TB of storage in post. ![]() Unfortunately, making three backups really chews up a lot of storage capacity. Making three copies is necessary to protect against disaster if a drive should fail. The third copy is the one I use for editing and grading. The A and B copies are my digital negatives that will be put into storage and might never be needed again. I don’t know how you make backups in your workflow, but I generally make three copies of all my raw footage:ģ) A third copy saved on my editing system’s SSD. But even more important than stretching card capacity is how much storage space you will save in post. Smaller file sizes mean you can get more recording time on your memory cards. Having an efficient codec is important because it reduces file sizes. For example, 4K XAVC-I (240 Mbps) is about three times more efficient that 4K ProResHQ (754 Mbps) – with nearly identical picture quality – plus being just as easy to edit in post. Compared to ProRes, and other codecs that some brands of cameras use, XAVC on Sony cameras is amazingly efficient. ![]()
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