We want to achieve that our editors can work together with a proxy workflow via the cloud, not needing to manage all TB of ProRes-files and other media on their systems, unless needed.
The editors either have a laptop or desktop Mac with one external SSD (Cache) for temporary files in FCP and local storage location for Postlab & Postlab Drive. We have a large external RAID (Studio) for the computer used for ingest, grading and mastering. We also need an internet connection for our workflow, so this is not an off-line from connection perspective, but off-line from not have access to original media from video cameras perspective.
Media management
In order to get the proxy workflow working together with other editors, you need to know about the limitations you have in your NLE and other tools. In our case, we are working with FCP 10.5, ProTools, Resolve and Postlab & Postlab Drive.
First of all, you have to store your media outside the library to have Postlab working. For each library in FCP you define storage locations and the Media folder is where FCP store optimized media, original media and proxies. But you can’t separate locations for optimized media and proxies so we have to make a work-around.
I set the media folder to be on Postlab Drive, but can change it later when doing optimized media instead of proxies.
In FCP (FCP/X), you can have proxies on movies, but not audio, photos and other types of media. The proxies can be either ProRes and/or H.264 in different reduction of sizes.
When creating proxies, FCP creates a folder with the date of the clip and the same name as the original clip, but with another format & size. If you have two clips with the same filename during same day, then one of the clips will have a renamed proxy file. This is one of the reasons why I change to unique files names before importing into FCP, as the cameras Sony FS5, A6300 and GoPro doesn’t support user defined filenames.
As I want to store proxies, audio and photos on in the cloud, but not the original high-resolution videos, my recommendation is to separate the media in different folder based on media type. This makes it easier to make a copy of folders from the local system to the cloud, instead of identifying and copying individual files based on filetype.
The process we have is to create a folder for each type of media and card, and rename unique filenames for each media file on memory card from cameras. For video cameras and audio recorders is this fairly simple, but for mirrorless cameras and mobile phones, used for both stills and media this is a little more complex and we don’t have an automated flow for this yet.
Importing media
Importing is done as usual and we select to leave in place and to create a new event for each imported folder. We create proxies, but not optimized media as we earlier set media storage location to Postlab Drive for the library.
When creating proxies, I chose to make only 25% size in order to save space of storage in the cloud and ProRes as my computer doesn’t support H.264 in hardware.
After importing photos and audio-files into FCP, in separate events, I have to manually copy the folders to PostLab Drive and then relocate the location of the original files in FCP by going to the event, mark them and the File - Relocated media - Original files.
If you have stored your proxies locally, you also need to copy the proxy files manually, and then relocate proxies in the same way.
After checking in the library in Postlab can another editor open the project and continue with the edit, without the need for the external RAID.
We also use Drive to share XML-files used for exporting the time-line to other applications, like ProTools or Resolve.