Canon 300/305 Workflow

After working with my Canon XF 300 camera now for several months, I have modified my workflow a little from when I recorded the video tutorial and thought that I should add some new thoughts and observations here, as an addendum to the video tutorial. If you have not seen the video tutorial, you can see it here.

I now no longer use the Canon software that came with the camera. Here is what I do now, and it seems to work the best....

When I go out on a shoot, I take two external drives, so that I always have a backup of my clips. I create a main folder on the first hard drive that describes my shoot…. Usually the country I am in, plus the year…. So for example, on a recent, exciting trip I was on, my main folder was "Somalia2011".

Then, when I go to offload a card, I create a sub-folder, (like “Card1”) and then drag and drop the whole card into that folder, using the “Contents” folder from the card. This method still gives you a list of folders, one for each clip, but that is OK. If you have the “Contents” folder, it acts as some kind of database, that lets you then access all the clips at once inside the "Source Browser" tool of Edius, and keeps all of the metadata intact.  (It is vital to include this "contents" folder, in your transfer.  If you open the "Contents" folder, select all, and simply drag and drop all of the media folders on to the folder you created on your hard drive, the Source Browser will not open or read your files.) 

Once I have the cards of the day offloaded to my first drive, I then backup the days folders to my second hard drive. (Having a laptop with two USB3 ports, plus using two USB3 external drives helps improve the speed of this process!)

Then, in Edius, right click on the XF folder in the browser tab, and navigate to the folder “Card1”, (or whatever you have called it), click on it once. Now the folder should show up in the folder tree in Edius under XF. Click on this folder in Edius once, and "whala!", all of the clips of that folder show up in the browser! (Once again, if they don't show up, it is probably because you have not transferred your media, using the Contents folder, which needs to be inside another folder on your hard drive that you have named, such as "Card1", "Card2", etc.  If you simply transfer the "Contents folder to your hard drive and try and have the source browser point to it, Edius will not recognize the files.  Your whole contents folder, needs to be inside another folder on your hard drive, and that is the folder that you point the Source Browser to.)

Since I already have the clips on two hard drives, I do not need to make a third copy, so I select all of the clips in the Source browser, right click, and choose the option “Add to Bin” from the drop down menu, rather then “Add and transfer to bin”.

Once that process is complete, the media is now ready to be used in the project, and can be accessed as long as I have that hard drive attached to the computer.

Unfortunately, you have to repeat this procedure in the "source browser" for each folder you have created for each card you have offloaded. You need to do this because of the meta data that is controlled by the “Contents” folder.