arthur richards

Serious nerd alert - but if you use Drupal and/or Subversion, you'll likely find this interesting. Lately I've been dealing with a Drupal module called 'dbscripts 'that helps me track changes made in a database with Subversion (SVN). Besides a few moments requiring banging my head against the wall, it's a pretty slick module - before this, keeping track of database changes and making it easy to roll back to a previous version was not something easy to do. But one thing that's been tricky to manage with the module is remembering to add/delete the files it generates/deletes in my Subversion repository. This has had nasty consequences of forgetting to check-in a newly added database table or causing conflicts by regenerating a supposedly deleted database table during a database restore... Shell scripts to the rescue!

First of all, ***n3rd alert***. This post is technical and jargony - so unless you care about video codecs, video editing, storage, etc, you probably don't want to read this :) But if you know anyone who knows about these things, please pass this on!

I'm facing some technical challenges attempting to shoot a documentary (potentially hundreds of hours of footage) on a camera using the AVCHD codec. The primary issues are storage space and coming up with a decent workflow to handle footage in Final Cut Express 4.2. I've got some thoughts on the matter, but really could use some advice!