Spreadsheets & the Sony MRC1K

Workflow! Such an important word and for this project maintaining the workflow: scripting, recording audio, editing audio, pre production, filming, editing, creating PDF's, putting it all together is a significant undertaking and anything that can help or support the workflow will be gratefully received. 

There have been two recent additions to our working methodology which have significantly advanced our workflow... the first is the use of a spreadsheet (pictured below) which we use to log every piece of filming that we undertake:

This might seem like a very small step but with so much footage being generated a detailed spreadsheet is an absolute essential.

Our second piece of workflow good news was the arrival of the Sony MRC1K.

This is a compact flash recorder which currently holds a 32Gb flash card. For us in real terms this means 143 minutes of HD recording.

Up until now we have been using DV tapes... lots of them(!) in fact we have several boxes full of DV tapes all of which have to be labelled and most importantly, captured in real time. In other words if you have a 60 minute tape with 60 minutes of footage it will take you 60 minutes to capture the data to your computer hard drive. Currently we have 16 of such DV tapes waiting to be logged and captured... a minimum of 16 hours...

however,

with our all new MRC1K we are no longer tied to capturing in real time... using the log and transfer function in Final Cut Pro we can transfer (capture) the footage in a fraction of the time!