I’ve worked with the producer and director Mechthild Reinders as a camera man over the years on her feature documentary. In the end, she had collected five years of footage – from Red material all the way to GH2 and GoPro. It amounted to an impressive 8TB. Let me say that again: 8TB in mostly AVCHD, hang on, that are how many hours??
When she approached me to help her as executive producer and editor I was flattered but a little worried too. It meant crafting an hour out of the collection and executing a broadcast delivery once a deal had been signed.
During the edit in Adobe Creative Cloud Premiere Pro, we had 29,000 assets connected to the project. I doubted that it would ever open and close properly again to be honest. There are those nightmare stories out there that editors are not able to shut down their systems anymore because it takes hours to open the project again. Well, …
It worked.
A 6 core Mac Pro with two graphics cards, 64GB Ram connected to a LaCie Raid (5 drives striped) managed to fire up in under 15 minutes.
I had a handful of program crashes that never lost more than an hour of work – I’d say that’s pretty good for 45 days of post production.
Stacked timelines in Premiere Pro were immensely helpful in sorting story lines.
I’ll leave the scoring, color correction and audio post for an update a bit later…
Broadcast date in Germany and France: March 2017, there will be an english online version around that time too.