Once a shooting day is done we receive at least 1 disk back from the producer. They will connect this disk to 1 of the mediamanager’s sets. Producers NEVER copy the footage themselves, only the media manager can do this.
The disks are being copied over to the corresponding project folder on the RUSHES workspace. On the RUSHES workspace we have in the root folder _template. This template is what we should use for all projects. We divide everything based on shooting day and camera. If only one camera is used for a shooting day, then we can throw away the other folders.
The folder structure we usually receive can be a bit messy, so some cleaning up is necessary. Everything but the actual video files can be collected in an _other folder in the same CAM folder per shooting day.
Rushes template, found in the root folder
Example of rushes after being sorted.
Once everything has been properly stored, we can import the rushes into davinci (for proxies) and premiere to edit with.
Only reformat the transport disk the day after the rushes have been copied onto the server. By then, the server has had enough time to create a back-up of all the footage.
A final thing we have to do is copy the new rushes onto an archive disk (see archiving). Check which disk has enough space, take into account the amount of shooting days still left if the rushes are not complete yet.
Things to double check
We always tell our producers and DP’s that we never should shoot in RAW, R3D or any of these file types or in anything above 4K. If it does happen, we need to convert these files first to Prores 4444XQ (without Alpha) and scale it down to 4K resolution. If davinci doesn’t recognize the file type, use Assimilate or the ARRI Colortool.
If you’re not sure what type of codec was used, there is the free tool called MediaInfo. This tool extracts all the Metadata from a video file so you can read it properly.
We also store RAW Photography on the RUSHES workspace. The folder structure here works the same way, where we store it per shooting day. There is no need for a CAM_A subfolder, since they usually shoot with 1 device.