Thursday, July 11, 2013

I should call my blog editing on the fly

Here is the interesting thing about my editing process.

I used portable USB drives with a laptop to edit from.

Why, you might ask.

The reason is I often edit away from distractions at the house. A lot of distracting demands and moaning happens around here. General griping and complaining.

It's easier at times to set aside some time and edit over lunch or at a coffeehouse. And to do that, you are better off with a smaller more portable USB drive that is portable. Also if the power fails where you are during and edit or while digitally encoding, your small setup will still run without a ups, because you will switch over to battery power in the event of a power outage. That gives you time to recover.

Another interesting side benefit to editing from small USB drives. Although it costs a little more especially if your trying to archive projects And keep the edits on hard disk space, the original files being on a small drive can be safely stored cheaply off site in a safety deposit box. If you have a copy of your recent digital source footage on a small USB drive and it's stored in a bank safety deposit box, the footage would survive even if your house burned down and you lost all your hard drives and computers. The source video would survive as well as any other data you might store off site.

Some might say, what about cloud storage?

The cloud requires a connection to the Internet and you have to pay a monthly fee for storage space. More space requires a larger monthly fee. And that fee will work out to a lot more than a low cost small safety deposit box. You don't own the cloud and if you stop paying your data may be lost. The data may be secure on a cloud but if it's lost the provider probably won't be able to insure nobody else got your data.

Also the cloud takes up a lot of time streaming data to it over an internet connection. A fast connection would be real expensive for a monthly expense. I can drive over to my bank during the opening hours and pull out a hard drive very quickly and have terabytes of storage available right now without any download time required.

The downside to small safety deposit boxes is they are not able to handle the larger drives, at least not the larger sized home desktop drives at my bank. My bank requires a larger box, which might not be available because the desktop disk drives which may hold more take more space.

So I end up using small laptop drives for editing and also for critical offsite backup to a safety deposit box. It's probably cheaper to do this for off site storage which is secure than practically any other method.

Of course I'd be smart to have a copy at home as well of that so I have two physical devices with the data and one off site. This provides physical redundancy as well as security.

If my Cornerstone source video is locked away safely in a deposit box, I don't have to worry about losing it to theft or fire from the house. I took the original storage drive for USB Cornerstone footage and had it out ready to travel to give it to Glenn Kaiser during the Audio Feed Festival. Unfortunately I got there late and missed the first official day, so I missed Glenn. And a second problem was that disk drive was in a laptop bag I left behind, so the transfer of a copy of the Raw video to JPUSA of the source wasn't meant to be last weekend. I still have more video to edit so they will get more edited videos the longer I wait. As the yearly fest and reasons for using that video for promotional reasons are kind of obsolete, with the demise of the Cornerstone Festival, there is less of a rush in getting all the videos edited and to them.

Now the Audio Feed Festival video footage has a more critical deadline perhaps if they are to use it to promote next years festival. It's important I suppose to edit that quickly and get samples of each band edited in a fast manner. The best way to do that is just edit one song per band and not focus on many songs for video for the bands. As it's for the festival a song per band will provide some good samples that the festival may be able to use or edit down into a short promo. The festival will likely want and need more video than I shot because I only shot bands for the most part and have virtually no normal video or even back stage video. I just didn't have the time.

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