Metadata: The most important advantage of a P2 Workflow
I am always surprised by the numbers of people that I meet who own P2 equipment, yet fail to utilize the one feature that can save tremendous time in post production and archive.
I know that some owner/operators hand off the footage and don't care what happens to it, but I can tell you from experience that your clients will appreciate the efforts of metadata preparation on a shoot, whether they know it yet or not.
Even using a simple P2 metadata process to fix one of the biggest pain points for editors of P2 footage, the generic clip name, is reason enough to give it a try.
More complex metadata workflows can be achieved by using some 3rd party tools like RayLight and P2Flow.
I have used metadata workflows on everything from feature length films, to the Iditarod Sled Dog Race, to corporate events. The bottom line is it saves time, and as we all know, time equals money.
Look at this job I just completed as an example:
Corporate golf outing, with 5 P2 cameras positioned across 3 holes. 9 Foursomes playing 2 holes with a celebrity pro golfer. Each golfer gets a video of "their day with the pro".
Without metadata, my assistant editor (or myself) would spend a week or more identifying golfers and making bins.
By using P2 metadata and Raylight (which will create folders based on the metadata field "Program", I start with folders for each foursome and all the clips based into those "buckets" automatically by Raylight. This cuts my prep time by half.
Another use for metadata comes into play when searching for clips. On the Mac OS, when you use the Find command (Apple Key + F), the search will include metadata.
Take this example:
Clip is named CamA-Scene1-Take005, which is better than A04BZ1, but if I was looking for all the clips with actor John Smith, I would be out of luck unless I had John Smith in the metadata field. Then the search would give me the results I wanted very easily and quickly.
So as you can see, P2 Metadata can make your life much easier in post, and endear you to your clients.
