Since making room for an EX1 in my life, something wonderful has happened to my edit work: I have plenty of well named clips in projects that are filed and searchable.

Of course, logging and capturing is the foundation layer of any edit. But sometimes edits happen to tight deadlines under pressure, and the time taken to patiently spool through each tape and refer to the shot logs, selecting the best takes and marking their in/outs ready for batch capture is quite frankly longer than the time to suck in a whole tape, apply DV Start-Stop detection and switch your thumbnails on so you can roughly sort into bins of rushes. And as deadlines shrink and edit budgets get tighter, there’s a temptation to not actually label each clip according to content. Just rely on bin names. And then you find yourself plucking shots from whole rolls of tape rather than individual clips. And that’s when you hit the needle in a haystack syndrome. The trouble is, taking in each clip and giving it a name takes a lot of time that, thanks to the absurd shooting ratio that DV offers (today I am working my way through 3 hours of footage for a 3 minute insert – a shooting ratio of 60:1), it would take days. And for a 3 min insert I have hours.

Of course professional crews don’t overshoot, and take careful notes of what they shot, where, when, who, and so on. But when a client hands you three tapes, what do you do? So to cut to the chase: The Sony EX1 is partnered with XDCAM Transfer – an application/plug-in for FCP users. Its party trick is to highlight, say, a dozen clips out of 60-100 on a card/disk, and enable you to name them all ‘exhibition GVs’, then jump around instantly between clips marking some good, some no good (which can make them disappear from your shot list), pick out some and add ‘sponsor’ to their filename. 15-30 seconds. Onto the next batch of shots. And so on. Select all, import, and lo – neatly labelled shots minus the dross. And I’ve been timing this: for a 16 GB card (an hour’s worth, maybe 100-200 shots for event work), I can log/label and import in half the time it would take to ingest the footage from tape. And this is firmly implanted in my mind today as I ingest 3 hours of PDX-10 footage with an unset clock, so DV Start-Stop detection doesn’t work, and the tapes are full of TC breaks. Yesterday I had 90 mins of footage shot and edited by end of play for a 6 minute item. Batch naming makes the editor’s lot a happy one, especially in time pressured environments.