Read this blog entry for the ultimate movie-making nightmare. In the old days, the danger was destroying your actual film stock; in the digital era, it's all about losing your video data.
Considering the manpower, time, and money that go into making even a low-budget movie, the physical end result is staggeringly small. A few miles of film, a couple dozen video cassettes… or a several hundred gigabytes of abstract data.
The "all digital workflow" is always brought up as the coming Big Thing. Shoot your footage digitally, not to a tape, but to files on some kind of computer drive, either solid state (P2, Flash) or traditional (spinning platter hard drive). No need to capture or digitize footage into a computer-friendly format, because it's natively stored that way. Edit the original files at full resolution. Never have to worry about going back to tape, or negatives, or anything. Glory, hallelujah.
Overlooking some fundamental flaws in this logic (try doing offline editorial for a feature with uncompressed HD media, 4k files, or anything of finishing quality, and feel the pain), there is a danger inherent in this thinking – that this makes the movie-making process simple and easy. It goes something like this: "We don't have to have to worry about film labs and transporting stock, telecine and vaulting negatives. We don't have to worry about dubbing tapes and digitizing, using rented decks on a fully built-out edit system. We can build a cheap Final Cut station on my buddy's old G5, and buy a couple of firewire drives to edit on. We don't have to worry about the technology, we can be cheap and worry about the art!"
The digital workflow is not the magic bullet. For every worry you manage to avoid, you introduce one.
You don't need AC's on set loading film canisters, but you need someone whose entire job is to track which cards/drives have been shot, which have been transferred, and which can or cannot be wiped and reused. You either need a computer and electricity for reliable hard drive storage on set, so you can back your cards up in the field, or you need enough cards that you can afford to wait until the end of the day, and have someone spend the downtime transferring the data – preferably in an organized and careful fashion. Your media is your movie, so you want it taken care of!
You don't need to vault negatives or tapes, or deal with dubs and prints and telecines. Except that you do. All of those procedures are, essentially, backing up your media by making copies, and then storing the originals. The nice thing about tape dubs and film negatives is that you pay someone else to have the expertise to make accurate "copies" for you, so you don't have to worry about it. But if you're treating the digital workflow as your cheap solution, you probably don't realize that you have to do the same thing with your digital media, and so have no expert available to you. Someone has to import every clip, using the metadata from the shoot. This takes time and drive space. Then (especially if you're shooting uncompressed HD, 2K, 4K, or RED), you need to generate a proxy, or transcode the media to a video format easier on your system, that takes up less space. This requires even more time, and still more drive space. Now you're ready to work… but you should make copies of everything to a different set of drives, and ideally also a tape-based computer backup, and store those at a different location. When your drives fail (and they always will) or your facility is broken into, you don't want to lose everything, like those poor people from the blog posted above.
And, because you're doing this cheap and easy, odds are the only person available to do all of this is the editor. He may or may not be up to the task; there are a lot of video editors out there who know just enough about software NLEs to enable them to practice their craft, which is editing movies, and not much else. If this is the case, you need a strong assist to take care of all of this administrative BS, which is yet another cost and consideration, and he still may not be experienced in the formats you chose to use.
This has been kind of a rant, for which I apologize. This all comes from feeling bad for the people who lost their movie, yet being frustrated with their stupid decisions. Every few weeks, a friend or a friend of a friend asks about ways to shoot a movie with direct-to-disk cameras, and I give my advise, only to be told they're trying to do it cheaply, and won't do any backups or transcoding. It makes me want to pull my hair out. You don't edit your film using negatives on a flatbed, do you?! It all comes from this willful lack of common sense; people need to think about these things, and not just assume that, because the marketing tells them it's easy, that it actually is.
I am not any kind of feature film expert, but I am knee-deep in post production and current video technology, and I tell you now, if it can go wrong, it will, especially if you assume it won't.
Backup your stuff. Treat it like a film negative. Because it is. And once it's gone, you can't get it back.
[c/o Little Frog in High Def]
