Cecily's Week 3 Update

These past couple weeks have been a solid lesson in trial and error, that is for sure.  After last week's class I had the realization that I had not properly logged my footage.  That isn't entirely to say I had logged it incorrectly, but that in my correct logging process within FCP7, I had allowed my files "on the Finder level" (thanks, Tristan, for my new logging language) to disappear into a scratch vortex.  I had a meeting scheduled for Friday to meet with Tristan and learn how to do the process correctly, however that meeting fell through when his afternoon became swamped with something else.  We rescheduled for the earliest possible time, which unfortunately for me wasn't until this morning at 9am.  However, I did meet with Jennifer yesterday afternoon and she set down a solid foundation for my understanding of file organization by going through my harddrive with me and evaluating my situation.  She was hesitant to change anything permanently, so she suggested I wait until I had the expertise of Tristan at my disposal.

Tristan...can we all just agree he is an absolute gem of a human being?  Taryn and I threw him as many questions as we could think of, or rather, as many questions as we knew to ask, and he did a very good job of explaining them as best he could to help us understand.  Basically, as I suspected, because of my lack of organization on the Finder level, I need to reorganize my file structure for my transcoded clips and then re-import them into FCP 7.  However, I need to be meticulous in sorting out which files I have already transcoded and which files I have not.  After FCP died on me mid-project last week, I lost a lot of the work I'd done and so my memory is unreliable.

I also have to put my Go Pro footage through compressor and then properly organize that, some of which I have completed with the new version of compressor installed on the computers in the basement lab.  Not terribly difficult, just time consuming.  I feel much more confident about knowing what needs to happen, but slightly overwhelmed about doing the work.  Because of my naiveté pertaining to logging film, filming, hard drives, and well...just this entire process, I think it would have been incredibly helpful to have all of this available at the start of the quarter as a refresher.  I don't think I'm alone in feeling a bit lost in knowing all the details of properly logging and organizing footage.  It isn't difficult once you know how to do everything, but is is horrendously difficult to progress without all of this knowledge.  Furthermore, I'm having to redo hours and hours worth of work, which I understand is part of the process, but I could have been MUCH farther along had this week happened weeks ago.  I would have made meetings sooner if I had any idea how actually clueless I was.  I didn't even realize there was an issue with the way I had been organizing!