Advice on organizing project files
by Conrad Chu
on
Oct 28, 2008 at 7:31:36 pm
I'm part of a church with 6 FCP workstations and we just got FCS on an Xserve. When importing FCP projects into a new FCS Production, I realize a lot of our directory structures that we made for that project get flattened (like photos/, music/, soundfx/). We often need to access music/photos that were used in previous projects. However, b/c everything is run by volunteers and time is limited, I don't I can enforce people to provide metadata for each MP3 or JPEG. So, I'm afraid my assets will just be overrun with useless bits of files that I can't sort through.
1. FCS is flattens hierarchy similar to Media Manager. When I bring a project back to work on in the future, all the 200+ assets are munged up. Are they any solutions to this besides bundling the assets? I need to be able to search for MP3/JPGs of old projects so bundling is not an option for me.
2. When dragging in a FCP file to a production which in turn pulls in dependent assets, do you actually tag each incoming asset with metadata? That seems time-consuming.
3. Random Question: we're going to be adding a SAS drive to the FCS/Xserve as an NFS mount to use as our main Library storage. Will Edit-in-place be supported in this setup? I assume as long as a client workstation can get to the right URI (file://xserve/volumes/sasdrive) then we're fine.
4. Random Question: should I have people drag things into Library device or Media device? What's the difference?
Re: Advice on organizing project files by Andrew Richards on Nov 12, 2008 at 5:12:47 am
Edit-in-place would solve your problem by letting you organize a filesystem that stays put as you work on it. Unfortunately, I doubt an NFS mount on the FCSvr host will be able to keep up with cutting on six workstations (or even just one depending on your codec).
You must be maintaining some sort of simple metadata by way of your filing if you are so keen to maintain it, why not set up your NFS share and load it up with your MP3 and JPEG files and folders and then set up production scans and asset scans that can create assets out of these files and automatically add common metadata during the scan? If you have any kind of naming convention or theme to the names of files at all, you can also set up subscriptions that can fire off set metadata responses to fill in field values based on certain filename filters.
That way, FCSvr does some of your metadata entry and gathers your assets into productions per your folders. Then you don't have to worry about how media shows up on the user end. Any new media would go in as batches that will share a lot of common field values or be added in small enough groups that perhaps the users wouldn't be overwhelmed with tagging them.
Or you can always try to convince your volunteers that a little time invested now to tag assets will reward them later when they are searching for that perfect JPEG much more quickly.
Re: Advice on organizing project files by Chris Smith on Jun 23, 2009 at 5:23:26 am
Hey Andy,
just had a follow question to this response...
"If you have any kind of naming convention or theme to the names of files at all, you can also set up subscriptions that can fire off set metadata responses to fill in field values based on certain filename filters."
I have been trying to do make the above happen and can't quite get it. I have asked this question in another post and this is the response I received:
"Maybe you can take a look at external scripting plus fcsvr_client setmd or Read XML (more appropriate) functions.
For example, you can run a response of "run external script" and the asset that "triggered" this will have it's name parsed to this script argument. You can then read the spaces between "_" and write a XML with appropriate metadatafields and FCS will read it and change the metadata listed in the XML.
This is just an idea, please feel free to ask further on."
Which was very helpful, but my knowledge of XML and external scripting is not that great, and although I am going to have to learn this to get the full potential out of FCSvr in the future, Is there a way to do what you describe within the FCSvr itself.
I basically have a common naming system for files and want to make it so that metadata fields are filled in automatically based on the structure of the filenames.
