These days are long and exhausting. But I’m not the only one. The crew I’ve met on this set are incredible. So talented and very down to earth. The cast are very professional and knock out long extended scenes in no more than 3 takes. Micah and Blake are shooting the script with precision and with some great composition. When I say precision I can’t tell you the atmosphere that they are working in but it is amazing. Jesse is running around doing whatever needs to be done. This is a feature length script and we are shooting it in 8 days. Nothing can be done about that and we knew that coming in. We work incredibly fast together as a unit and this production is solidifying how we work together.

My Job…
I will tell you exactly what I’m doing on this set. We are shooting with 2 Panasonic HVX200 cameras in HD at 720p 24fps. My job is to download the footage from the P2 cards organize the shots and back everything up on external hard drives.

Storage
What I asked for was this…

The Netgear READYNAS™ NV+ RND4210. RAID that sucker and not have to worry about losing a hard drive.

What I got was this…

I have 2 500gb and 2 750gb external drives. I’m currently capturing the footage directly on the external. After the footage is captured I open each file and rename the file based on the slate from the footage. This is the name of a file looks like [ 34a-2-a.mov ] The 34a is the scene, the 2 is the take, and the a is the camera (we are shooting with 2 cameras a + b). I create a folder with the acronym of the film, in that folder I create more folders for each scene. Then I place the named file into the correct scene folder so the editor has everything they need from each scene. I then grab the folder from the main hard drive and back it up on another external. After that backs up I then throw it on another external. There is no way we want to lose the footage.

The reason I have to do this is simple if you ever worked with the P2 cards or the HVX200, you can’t digitally stamp a scene onto the cards when you are shooting. That is the only complaint I have with the HVX, very small one but it would make editing so much easier.

P2 Workflow
I sold my Powerbook G4 to Blake so I could upgrade to a Macbook Pro. It was a great decision for both of us. The Powerbook G4’s PC Card/CardBus slot will fit the P2 card and you can download the driver from Panasonic’s Website. The Macbook Pro’s ExpressCard/34 slot is to small for the P2 card, so you have to get a DuelAdapter PCMCIA to ExpressCard Converter in order to download from the P2 card. Which I do not have. So I’m using Blake’s Powerbook G4 which rocks.

Dailies
With technology at our fingertips and working with the P2 cards it is easy to convert footage and transfer to an ipod or iphone. Which is what I’m doing for the Executive Producer on this project. Great idea and it gives him a sense of ease and knows how the film is looking.

That is all for right now as I wait for the 3rd backup drive to fill up. Peace.

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