Moving Project to laptop to work on at home?

[adamt]

whats the "approved" method for taking an existing Project from my Mac at work and being able to open and work on it using my laptop?

I have watched the video about archiving, but im not clear on where the archived files are initially saved, and if its ok to move those files to a new disk and different mac.

regards

Adam

[BKM]

Archiveing is the only approved method. You can do a metadata archive which doesn't save sources (assuming you haven't cached on import) If your sources are linked on a portable drive, then you can archive your project data. This will create a file that you copy to a disk, take home and unarchive it. You also need to bring the drive with all of the source material on it. Your project should open up and link to the sources without any issues.

There are lots of options with archiving and you can use it to archive cached media and renders as well, everything gets compressed in an archive file and comes back wohtout having the original media attached. 

What is your specific situation>?

[adamt]

thanks Brian,

the specific situation is a project currently on my "Big Mac" attached to a huge raid, so theres no way i can take that home. The project has close to 40gb of mxf rushes. Im editing with the native mxf files - i have not cached the media.

I want to be able to take the project home over christmas and work on it with the laptop. I have a small 500gb thunderbolt SSD drive (170gb spare) so i can load the data onto this (and it also has an Autodesk Folder setup to work with Smoke on the laptop).

I am still finding the Autodesk file structure a bit daunting...so a couple more questions if you dont mind...

should i save the Archive to the Raid, and then copy over the completed archive to the SSD?  

or is it better to save directly to the SSD?

Do i need to save the archive somewhere within the Autodesk folder, or can i save it to anywhere on the raid? and the same when transfering to the portable drive?

thanks

Adam

[BKM · Accepted solution]

Hmmm... When you are in the Media Hub and using Archive you can tell it to archive anywhere. On the RAID, on a USB Flash Drive, whatever. it will create an Archive file.   A Header file and a .seg file (or many if you set it to create segmented files) 

Here is the rub, You can tell Smoke to archive your 40 gigs of rushes, but they will archive at uncompressed frames, so your 40 gigs might become 400 easily. 

You can archive the data, save that Archive file(s) to a drive. Then also copy your 40 gigs of rushes to your TB drive.  Then when you unarchive, you will have to CONFORM your files. (unlink/relink) This will only CONFORM your edit sequences so all of your source libraries will still be referencing the clips on the raid.  There is no easy way to relik those sources as sources. 

SO if you just want to work on the edit, they you are ok. If you need to edit more and add more sources to your seq, then you will have to reimport the sources again. 

When you finish, you can rearchive again, and you will have to do the whole relink conform dance again on the big Mac at the office.

It's doable, but not elegant.

[adamt]

i think you just gave me the best excuse to forget work over christmas, and worry about those procedures in the New Year!

Thanks for the explanation, Brian.

best

Adam

[svenbox2]

As long as the path to the media is the same on both systems then Smoke will find the media. I've been using symlinks and accessing the media through that link. If I later move the media to another drive I can then change the symlink to point to the new location and my source files are still linked.

If you were to move the project to another system you would have to create a new link in the same location. In my case I have put my links within /smoke_media

It does mean planning ahead and originally loading media through that 'link file' and also you need to keep the folder structure the same when you move the media.

That works for me although a bit of a faff - would like to see Smoke handle moved media a bit better in future.

Hope that helps, 

Sven