After you’re done shooting, make sure to back up and organize all your footage onto the CFC hard drive provided, so the editor knows what’s up. In order to make project hand-offs between different editors and project managers we’ve created a standardized way of formatting your project files. This assures everyone is working in the same way so there’s less time spent reorganizing and reconnecting files.
Drive Space
If you are choosing the hard drive, be sure there is enough space not only for the footage, but for the edit as well. Ideally, it would be double the space. For example, if you think there may be two terabytes of footage filmed, go with a four terabyte drive. We like these WD drives. They are relatively cheap and usually have more than enough space for one project. If the drive is going to be taken out and about, it's also very useful to protect it with a case.
**Eventually our goal is to have partnerships with hard drive manufacturers to get drives for free or extremely discounted rates, but for now, this is the best option on the market.
Drive Format
95% of our work will be done on Mac OS computers. So unless otherwise specified, all hard drives should be formatted for Mac OS. ***Mac formatted drives should be “MAC OS EXTENDED (JOURNALED) . Windows formatting is FAT 32.
Content Organization
As mentioned above, if the projects is handed off to an assistant or a second editor we want to make sure the project editors don’t spend hours looking for and reconnecting files. The following page shows how we’d like for each project’s files to be organized on the hard drives.