- Yo what's up, everyone.
Welcome back to another video.
This video is going to be responding to some questions
that were placed on the "How to Edit a Documentary" video
I released about a month ago.
And there were some great comments on there
about creative editing.
And I'm going to form a part two,
and talk about the creative side
of editing long form documentaries.
There were also some technical questions
that I'd love to address in this video,
around how to manage 4k RAW workflows
for long form projects.
So without further ado,
here are some of your questions
that you placed on that video.
So Von Thinking has commented,
"Would love to see how you manage proxies"
and "keep such a huge 4k workflow going,
"without turning the computer into a hellfire machine.
So I think this project for Ōra King,
the documentary in question,
was around 26, 27 terabytes of footage.
And then obviously a lot of those clips in that documentary
were 4k or higher
and they were shot in Blackmagic RAW with URSA G2.
And there was a bunch of Pocket 6K RAW footage.
There was also a RED camera
that shot a lot of the underwater footage.
And then we had a lot of Apple ProRes RAW footage
for the DJI drone.
And so lots of RAW footage, tons of data.
And that is where the server of our studio comes into play.
We've got hundreds of terabytes of data capacity
and that's wired up over a 10 gigabit ethernet connection.
And it's serving essentially every computer in the office
with 10 gigabit ethernet.
And so the read and write speeds
to the server of everyone working off it
anywhere between 600 to 800 megabytes a second,
read and write.
So it's plenty fast enough to edit RAW footage directly off
but even then it can still get a little bit laggy
and bottlenecky.
So what I did was I transcoded
a lot of the DJI Apple ProRes RAW footage,
and the RED RAW footage into a mezzanine codec,
which is essentially an intermediary codec
that is still robust enough to deliver from.
Now that's different to optimize media or proxies
because proxies always need to be relinked
back to the original for export.
So a lot of the RED and a lot the drone shots
were transcoded into an Apple ProRes 4444.
And I basically just edited straight off them.
It really minimized the bottleneck
in terms of reading that data off the server.
So the short answer to that question is,
I didn't actually use any proxies in this workflow.
So we're blessed enough to have the ability
to read and write directly onto the server
and host the 27, 26 terabytes worth of footage directly.
And so a lot of the bottlenecks are alleviated
when it comes to data storage
and then the bottlenecks turn to more of the computer side
and actually having a computer fast enough
to process that RAW footage.
Blackmagic RAW footage is beautiful to work with.
And a lot of the technology has been built
to actually be processed by the camera.
And so the computer is not having to work as hard
with Blackmagic RAW footage
as it would be with other types
and other flavors of RAW footage
such as the RED R3d files.
Now that's not to say that it's the best way
to approach a documentary of this sort.
I would probably in the future
transcode all of the original files into proxies
and link them into DaVinci
and hopefully be able to store all those proxies
on a single two terabyte SSD external drive.
And this will just allow me
to throw it into a laptop and edit anywhere I want.
Unfortunately, I was stuck in the office
with the edit machines that we have there
because I was needing to source all of the footage
directly off the server.
So that is an issue,
but if portability isn't a problem to you
then potentially you could look into a robust enough server
to edit directly off.
On the computer side,
there is definitely the need
to have a lot of RAM in your computer.
I've got 128 gigabytes of RAM within my 27 inch iMac.
And this really helps
when it comes to loading large timelines.
Obviously when you're loading large timelines
it's trying to pull all of those clips
and reference those clips at the same time
in the same timeline.
And the RAM helps to
just handle those really long timelines.
So the other thing that helped a huge amount
was creating a PostgreSQL database
instead of a disc database.
Now, DaVinci has two types of databases that you can create.
And the PostgreSQL database
gives you the ability to have a collaborative
or shareable database
hosted on a separate machine from your edit machine.
Now I've put up a video about our server configuration here,
which you can check out but essentially it shows you
that we are hosting the DaVinci database on a Mac mini
and that is serving via the 10GbE network
the database to all of the edit machines.
And so the edit machine's job is essentially to edit
and it's not to consolidate the database
and that processing is done on the Mac mini
and all these little additions,
really just help to alleviate the bottleneck
from the edit machine and give the Mac mini and the server
responsibilities in terms of managing all that processing.
If your computer itself is trying to manage all of the data,
and manage the database, and manage the project file
then that could also bog it down
and cause a few bottlenecks.
I will say in my experience,
that PostgreSQL databases are far more robust
than disk databases.
Now I'm not a computer technician
and I don't really know what's happening
underneath the surface with the two differences,
but in my experience PostgreSQL databases
are far more robust.
Less crashes and more resilient
to those longer form timelines.
Alright, second question from Adam is,
"How much of your organization has done
"before you get into DaVinci as far as folder structures go
"or do you build your folder structure within DaVinci?
"Also, how do you go about saving projects of this nature?
"DRP or DRA, delete source, et cetera."
So organization for a project like this
is very much done within DaVinci itself.
Because this was a documentary that was shot over two years,
the footage on our server
was coming from all sorts of different directions.
I didn't feel comfortable pulling all that source footage
into a centralized folder.
So essentially we've got a hundred terabyte server,
there's footage all over it.
And I was just pulling footage
from all those individual sources into the project.
And then all of the organization was done
within DaVinci Resolve itself.
And the second part of that question
is all about saving projects,
DRPs or DaVinci Resolve Project
or DaVinci Resolve Archive files
do we delete source material, all that sort of stuff.
Now this was a huge documentary for the client
and we've actually built into our pricing structure
a fee to host their data on our server.
26 terabytes is a huge amount of data
and it would obviously cost us a lot of money
to host that off our own back.
And so as part of the documentary
we are hosting the project for about a year
and then there'll be an ongoing fee
to continue to host that,
which gives us the finances to expand the server
for future projects, if needed.
So in terms of all the RAW footage
we are holding onto the RAW footage.
In the future, all of this footage might be from our server
and put more into archive storage
but for now it's just active on our server.
Our server is duplicated in multiple locations
and so the data is just sitting there for now.
When it comes to DaVinci Resolve Archive Projects
I haven't archived this project currently
because all the footage is still active on the server.
If we were ever to
move the footage off the server into archive,
you would then create a DaVinci Resolve Archive project
for the final timeline.
So essentially the final documentary
it would pull references of all those final clips
and copy them into a new location
with the DaVinci Resolve Project.
This would obviously cull
the huge amount of data that is 26 terabytes.
And I imagine would bring it down
to anywhere between three to five terabytes
based on the final shots that we used in the final timeline.
For smaller projects,
we definitely do a DaVinci Resolve Archive render
and essentially render the final timeline with handles.
Cause a lot of the time
if you're using long form interviews,
the interviews might be anywhere from 30 minutes
to 60 minutes to even 90 minutes.
And even if you only use a second of that interview
in the final timeline, when you do a DRA file
without re-encoding the handles of that clip,
you're essentially having to copy
that whole 90 minute interview only for the two seconds
it's referenced in the final timeline.
So for a massive project with a DRA,
DaVinci Resolve Archive render,
I would definitely re-encode everything
with probably two seconds of handles either side.
Thanks Adam for that question.
Next question is from mjs.
"Do you publish any advice on purging unused data
"once a project is finished?"
I think this is a similar question.
I find it personally very difficult
to delete any data for a client.
Due to the nature of this documentary.
There's a lot of footage in there
that will be repurposed and used for years to come
through a whole range of other video productions.
So currently we're not purging unused data
and we're not really getting rid of anything.
We're just charging a fee to host the data for now,
and then in the future we'll be able to address
what we do with that.
Alright and final question.
Says, "Great video!
"Would love to know more about your technical workflow,
"proxies memory management, so many timelines."
I think we've addressed a lot of that,
but the second part of this is,
"I would like to make the jump from Avid for my next doc,
"but the long form, I've always been a bit scared to try it"
within DaVinci Resolve.
I was definitely in the same boat.
DaVinci Resolve traditionally has not been a very good
NLE or non-linear editor.
DaVinci Resolve started as a color grading piece of software
and it's still used around the world for that today.
And over the years,
they've acquired a bunch of other companies
such as Fusion and Fairlight.
And essentially just created
this really robust piece of software that is just awesome
at almost everything.
With that comes a few quirks
and I think there's a lot of discussion within the industry
as to how robust DaVinci will be going forward
because of the frequency of updates that they come out with.
They seem to be releasing features every single month.
And I just hope that as a piece of software
they prioritize the user experience,
fixing bugs and don't progress too fast
in terms of feature set.
Having said all of that, the NLE, the non-linear editor,
so the edit page and the cut page within DaVinci Resolve
is really proving to to be an awesome piece of software.
Avid is obviously still the industry standard
and it's used all around the world for a reason.
But I think there's perhaps just a little bit of a lag
in the industry because the industry is always slow
to adopt new systems and processes.
If something works every single time
and is reliable in the industry,
then it takes a long time for that
to be superseded by a new piece of tech.
And I think that's what's happening.
DaVinci is robust enough
to handle a lot of those long form projects.
Even feature films could be edited on DaVinci right now
but just because the entire industry
hasn't taken the step to DaVinci,
I think it'll be a while until you see
big facilities adopting it.
However, because I've had some experience in it,
I would recommend people jump ship as soon as possible
because I do feel like, this is just my opinion,
in the next three to five years
it will become industry standard to use DaVinci
for the NLE, for the color,
for the visual effects, and for sound mastering.
That's just my thoughts.
In my opinion using the PostgreSQL database,
hosted on an external machine with a robust enough machine
like a modern computer with at least 64 gigabytes of RAM
and some decent graphics memory,
you'll be off to the races with that.
That's all I have for now.
As always please comment below in the comment box.
If you have any questions about filmmaking
or the post-production workflow side of things,
I really want this channel to develop
into something that gives real value to you guys
and so I'm largely guided
by your questions and by your comments.
Really excited to get more videos out there.
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Alright, guys, peace out.
We'll see you in the next video.
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