Media Management & archiving on the set of "Wuss"

We deployed a multiple on-set archive and work-media workflow on the set of Wuss. It was decided early on that we would use the Cache-A Prime-Cache LTO archive appliance to create 30-year-shelf-life archives of the camera raw files right on set. 800GB LTO4 tapes are super economical, running about $40 for 800GB right now. (1.6TB LTO5 tapes are a little over $100 right now, for ref- so cost per GB lies with LTO4 for the moment)

During the first few days of the shoot, the workflow was to move the camera raw files to the Cache-A first, then open FCP log & transfer and create ProRes422 Quicktimes which were encoded to a Lacie 4BIG Enterprise running in RAID5 for redundancy.
The Cache-A connects direct to the Macbook Pro via gigabit ethernet, the Lacie connects over eSata, a Lexar Compact flash reader connects over Firewire800 and a SDHC card reader (for sync audio files) connects over USB2.

At the end of each day, the Media manager would take the LTO out of the Cache-A and hand it to the director to take home. This way even though we have LTO archives and RAID5 media storage, the files can be in two separate places for extra piece of mind. (I forgot to mention that the raw files also live on a drive within the Cache-A itself that serves as a staging drive before it goes to tape and another level of redundancy)



This workflow is solid, but its a little slow if you want your media manager to be syncing audio and doing rough assemblies on-set as we did. Canon's EOS plug-in for FCP seems to still be a little wonky when used to transfer long clips. We frequently encountered issues where L&T would cut off half of the clip, thus necessitating the media manager to have to go back and re-log clips from the raw files. (The issue was replicated on three different MBP's all with different specs of RAM, FCP and OS). The (sorta) solution to this is to not multi-task at all when you are using L&T, just let it cook.

So, about half-way into the shoot we added a second MBP and external G-RAID drive to move QT's to so we could work concurrently.


Here's what the media manager station looked like at the end of the shoot once we added a 3rd MBP (!) for additional editorial and behind the scenes cutting.




One last thing to mention: make sure you bring your own dedicated battery backup UPS system with you to each location. You never know what the power is gonna look like if youre moving around alot and you dont want to get in trouble if someone plugs in a 2K near your station and blows a circuit! Something like this APC 750VA should do the trick.