Media Manage An XML For Color Correction (from client drives to your raid)

November 18, 2016

Learn how to prepare to Media Manage an XML, and get footage off your client's hard drives and onto your high-performance RAID.


Series

Conforming ‘Giants’ Part 3

When Do I Media Manage Footage Off The Client Hard Drive?

In Part 2 of this series, we exported an XML from Premiere Pro CC. We did this in preparation for color correcting the Camera Original footage in another app; in our case, DaVinci Resolve. This project is for a client (it’s not a personal project) and we need to get the footage off their hard drives. Of course, we could just copy their entire hard drive – but that would take hours and eat up tons of our valuable RAID 0 hard drive space. Instead, I want to Media Manage an XML and take the footage off the client’s drive.

Media Manage an XML for efficiency and speed

When we Media Manage an XML, we’re choosing to only copy the footage used in the timeline. The Media Manager will ignore any unused footage. For this project, rather than Media Managing 800GB of Camera Original footage, we’ll copy across about 50GB.

That’ll save us a ton time (since the client drive is USB 3, which is still rather slow for this amount of copying). More importantly, if you ‘re doing client jobs then you probably want to conserve hard drive space.

High-performance RAIDs are expensive, why bog one down with 750 GB of unused footage?

Typically, I’d import an XML into DaVinci Resolve, do the conform and then Media Manage the conformed timeline onto my drives. But with CinemaDNG image sequences, the client USB3 drive is super-sluggish. Everything takes forever.

The question I’m asking myself is: At what point do I Media Manage this footage?

As you’ll see in the Video below – I’m kind’a punting. I’m going to try and conform this timeline off the Client hard drive – especially because the XML import has a lot that needs fixing. It’s always cleaner to Media Manage a fully conformed timeline. Otherwise, we’ll have to hunt down and copy across any media that’s supposed to be in the timeline—but isn’t.

Learn how I start to prepare for a Conform, after importing the XML

You’ll also learn how I prepare the Media Pool to easily relink from the Proxies to the Camera Originals. I’ll warn you right now—it’s not all kittens and cotton candy!

This Insight start from where we left off in Part 2

At the end of Part 2, we finished exporting our XML from Premiere Pro CC. In this Insight, I’ve got DaVinci Resolve Launched and we’re getting ready to populate our Media Pool and import the XML!

Enjoy and ask questions in the comments.

-pi

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Comments

Homepage Forums Media Manage An XML For Color Correction (from client drives to your raid)


  • andi winter
    Member

    hi patrick! the first thing i would when confronted with so much clips sharing identical tcs is to activate taking account of the filename in the conforming process of the xml. to do this change the default conform options under master project settings to “assist using reel names from the: source clip filename. am i wrong?


  • Patrick Inhofer
    Guest

    Not only are you correct, you’ve just previewed Part 4—and this project is a perfect example of why that solution doesn’t work for me about 60% of the time 🙂 But yes, it’s the next step and should always be attempted before manually syncing up shots that don’t properly line up at the XML import stage.


  • andi winter
    Member

    sorry for spoiling :).

  • Before you import the XML, you may have to tweak reel name match pattern in conform settings to properly match the reel names and double check the reel name column updates on the media pool. Also I have found that if the clip has bad timecode resolve tends to ignore the use frame count option when matching.

  • You could use smart bins to quickly separate the proxies from the raw and uncheck the proxy bins on import.


  • Patrick Inhofer
    Guest

    That’s a terrific idea. On a bigger job, I’d do just that. Since this was only 8 folders, the grunt method seemed easier since it didn’t rely on me being ‘smart’ 🙂


  • Patrick Inhofer
    Guest

    It would be nice if Resolve let us know when its reverted to frame counting. If nothing else, it would help us better understand what it’s trying to do. Sometimes this stuff feels like 100% voodoo.

  • I had a project where they dragged all the r3ds into a timeline in red cine and exported the timeline as proxies with all new timecode based on the clips position in bogus red cine timeline. They edited the who project based on bad timecode. I could not get resolve to use the frame counts to save my life until I manually reset each clips timecode to 0 one at a time.


  • Patrick Inhofer
    Guest

    Nightmare. They need to take the keys away from our tools for people who don’t understand the downstream implications of their actions 😉


  • Mark Ball
    Member

    These are great!


  • Laurent Prim
    Member

    Any idea of the ETA for part 4? Because I could really use the advice 🙂 Dealing with a very troublesome xml right now for a project.
    It’s driving me nuts.


  • Patrick Inhofer
    Guest

    Heh. Yes. Over the next week I’ll be releasing a spate of Insights (I got behind due to the holiday and then a mega-job that crushed me). At least two of the Insights I’ll be releasing are in this series. If you have a specific question, feel free to ask here.


  • Laurent Prim
    Member

    Fantastic, I’m looking forward to it. My troubles related to mixed formats shot on dslr with and without external recorder (framerates of 24, 23,97, 29,97) and timecode issues. Basically 29,97 footage was interpreted as 24fps in premiere, mixed with 24fps clips and 23,97fps clips which were not re-interpreted and all of it edited in a 24fps timeline. I ended up asking for a Prores export and went the scene detection route… Coud not get it to work but would like to be prepared for the future.

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