MEDIA MANAGING TO SMALLER SIZES

Until this weekend I have avoided the Media Manager, which has been dubbed the "media mangler" for good reason. In the past, when you used the Media Manager to do anything, it would produce varying results....none of them the correct ones. It still has issues with SPEED CHANGES, but that is because actual media isn't made. But other than that, its reputation has improved.

So, here I am working on a project, that documentary trailer that was shot HDV and that I captured as ProRes and DVCPRO HD. I settled on editing it using the DVCPRO HD captures, because I get more real time performance with effects and layering, faster render times...and because this is only going to DVD. Now, this week I am scheduled to fly to New Jersey for a P2 Bootcamp at Panasonic. A trip that will shut me down for 3 days on this project, and I really cannot afford to lose 3 days. The flight will take 6 hours and that is time that I can use to work on this project, even though the most I can squeeze out of my Powerbook battery is 4 hours. But, if I had an external firewire drive attached...bus powered and fast enough to handle the 1080i footage...my battery would last at most an hour and a half. So...what to do...

RECOMPRESS.

Yup...recompress the footage into a smaller file size that I can then store on my main hard drive. I looked at my options and there was on called OFFLINE RT HD. That seems like it will do the trick. So I dove into the Media Manager. The first thing I did was highlight the two folders of footage I wanted to recompressed and copy. Then I right clicked on them and chose MEDIA MANAGER (or you can go to the FILE menu and see the same option):



Now I wanted to recompress my exisiting footage into a smaller size, and retain the timecode, so I chose the following options:



Now...this took time. 24 hours on my Dual 2Ghz G5 (I know...upgrading soon). But I started it on Friday night when I was done, and it went into the weekend, when I wasn't working. And I'm sure an Intel Mac would do MUCH better.

The end result was 16.1 GB (from 435GB) and easily fit on my Powerbook. I could play it without dropping a frame, and when I brought over the cuts I already had, I could reconnect to the sequences pretty easily. I figure when i am done and bring the sequences back to the main project, they will reconnect as well. I base this on testing I did where I cut random shots into a sequence, put that into it's own project, brought that back to the main computer and reconnected. It all connected fine and matched up.

Nice to see things have much improved.