I have approximately 300 hours of material split virtually 50/50 between mini dv tapes and Canon XF305 card acquired footage.

I would ideally like to have all the footage in one place but then be able to use it in several different projects. They would vary in size from 2 minute trailers to say a 3 x 60 minute series, with many variations in between.

I have self funnded the shooting of this material and can't afford a craft editor until I can get get a commission, so I need to organise this material in a way that a craft editor would best like it prsented after I have found the best material and stories.

Any advice would be gratefully accepted. The best advice and the one that I use will get a with thank credit on any of the material that makes it out of the cutting room.

Hi David.  Follow as many of the guidelines in this post (here) as best as you can, and your future craft editor will love you forever.

If that post doesn't answer all your Q's, please post back again.  We'll make it work.

Thank you Pixel for that advice - It is a system I will follow. Re-reading my intial call fro help and advice I don't think I made my question too clear.

To clarify, I need to use the same media, a combination of mindv and cardbased MXF in several different projects. How do I do this? 

hi david,

in mc it's very easy:

make a project only with dv and one with mxf_cardbased. organize them with different bins.

in your new project you can open every bin from other projects and work with - you have access to all your mediafiles.

you can create other formats, framerates, what ever and mc handle all.

che

Hi again David - I just re-read your original post and have one quick piece of friendly advice.  I edit long format projects like the one you mention (multi-month or even multi-year edits), and the number one problem I run into as an editor is dealing with any organization system set forth before I arrive at the project. The smoothest, most efficient, and frankly least expensive projects (for the producer that is) are ones where I do all the postproduction organizing and digitizing.

For the sanity of any craft editor you employ on this, don't do anything at all except placing everything in one box, each tape, drive, DVD (etc) clearly labeled, and logged into a database or a clean-looking paper list.

Your editor will thank you.

Just to echo other's thoughts here, I do a lot of episodic series editing, and I'll create a "Common Elements" project which contains shared footage, shared effects templates, shared music/SFX, master templates, shared graphics/titles, etc. Then within any given episode project I'll open bins from the common elements depending on what I need. This way, when it comes time to delete individual episodes I can do so with the safety of knowing that deleting any given episode will NOT delete anything used from the common elements project.