From the avid handbook
By steve bayes

BACKING UP

If you are a beginner to the computer you may not realize the seriousness of backing up, but first imagine the cost of losing a day of work. Then imagine losing the entire project. Until you lose your first project, you might not back up on a regular basis. The fact that for about US$150 and five extra minutes you could have easily saved all the project information is a very compelling argument. I back up every day, but not to the same disks! Use a separate floppy for every day of the week and you have seven chances to find a useable version.

What should you back up? It is usually difficult to back up all of your digitized media in the middle of a project, but with a DLT and backup software that allows you to back up invisibly while you edit, backing up media isn't out of the question. Backing up digitized media is not really what is important to your job unless you are working with lots of non-timecoded material. What you really need to recreate your job is the project folder on the internal hard drive. Take all of it, not just the bins or just the project icon. Most short-term projects should have a project folder that can fit onto a high-density floppy. If you are working on "History of the World" or need to back up lots of graphics and music tracks from CDs, however, you need some other choices.

The first choice is a piece of software that ships with every MC/AX called Compact Pro. It allows you not only to save your project folder in less space because of the removal of redundant information (Huffinan encoding), but Compact Pro also allows you to segment the file and save it across multiple floppy disks. Some people are nervous about this and for a good reason; if one of the floppies fails or grows legs then the entire archive, your project, is unreadable. But I have spoken to engineers who don't trust floppy disks at all, for anything. Besides, this method is tedious and slow if there is really a lot to back up (more than two or three floppies worth or around 3 MB). You can find the size of a folder by clicking on it and then using Command-I to Get Info. If the process is unpleasant, you won't do it.

The best answer is one that has dropped in price recently and that is some form of removable disk backup like a Zip or Jaz drive from Iomega. Now you have 100 MB or more of storage on a single cartridge for approximately US$150 for the machine and US$10 for the cartridge. Attach this to the native SCSI port on your computer, the one that is not accelerated. If you have an external 3D DVE box (the Aladdin), you may have a SCSI conflict until you figure out the correct order and proper termination. The Aladdin 3D DVE needs to be the last in the SCSI chain because it is internally terminated and Zip drives are either 5 or 6 for a SCSI ID. Alternatively, you can send your project over a fast network to a system that contains a drive suitable for backup. On a particularly big job, I backed up to a Zip drive on an Ethernet server on the hour. Even though we lost power almost every afternoon while editing on location, we never lost any data.

Backing up to another hard drive on your system or another computer at your facility may not be good enough. I have had both the Boston Fire Department and Mother Nature ruin two different suites where I was working. (To be fair, the fire department was trying to save a historic building.) A particularly successful film assistant I know makes two backups of the project as the film gets close to picture lock. He takes one and his assistant takes one and they take separate routes home. It is Los Angeles after all. Avid Technical Support has a category in their database for recording reasons for equipment failure. Earthquake is one of thern. And having a floppy in your pocket also means you are more likely to get paid as a freelancer.

Chapter 3 e Intermediate Techniques 45

NON-TIMECODED MATERIAL

In the rush to complete a project, people throw anything and everything into their project just to get it done. Scratch audio is recorded straight to the timeline, VHS material is cued up by hand, and CDs are played directly into the Avid without any thought about recreating the job or, worse, starting over again if disaster were to strike. If the time is available, then seriously consider dubbing all non-timecoded material to a timecoded, high-quality format source. The slight loss of quality involved may be the difference between quickly being able to recreate what you have done or matching things by eye and ear. If you cannot timecode all your sources, then seriously consider the DLT for the evening after you have finished digitizing all your media. Remember, a digital nonlinear project is never done, they just run out of time, money, or both.

After saying all this, I will mention a very useful technique for getting CD music into the Avid without actually needing a CD player. If you have a CD-ROM player, you can import the CD track directly into the Avid if the rest of your project is at 44.1 kHz sampling rate. First open up SimpleText or MoviePlayer, the programs that ship with every Macintosh. Within both of these programs, open the desired CD and the track you need and choose Convert. Then go under Options and change to 16 bit, stereo, and 44.1 kHz. All of these must be set right and don't assume that the software will stay at those settings when you shut down for the night. Always check the options the first time you convert audio this way. Then save the file somewhere on a media disk and it win become an AIFF file. You can now import that in the import dialogue of the MC / AX and it will come into the system without ever having been converted to analog. This will save you some tape hiss and preserve the original dynamic range while eliminating the need for a tape deck to get the music or sound effects into the system. However, two weeks from now, when you need to redigitize the project for unexpected changes, you will have to re-edit all these elements back in by hand unless you back up the audio media.

CONCLUSION

These are a few of the types of techniques beginners don't grasp from the entrylevel course. They are usually a combination of changing some of your work methods and taking advantage of some unfamiliar functions. There are many other keys, modifiers, and tips and techniques in the MC/AX, but these are the main areas to concentrate on. Use trim and start to think nonlinearly about structure of the sequence. You will find your speed incrementing in leaps and bounds.