In this video I will run you through the basics of Data Wrangling on your ‘run of the mill’ TV Commercial. Steps that are covered include:

Hard Drive Labelling (0:11)

Formatting and Testing Hard Drives (1:14)

Tweaking macOS Finder Settings (7:28)

File Structure and Naming Conventions (9:27)

Optimum Shotput Pro Settings (10:48)

Using Shotput Pro to Wrangle Data (12:12)

How to Double Check Yourself to Avoid Mistakes (14:12)

Other Miscellaneous Data Management Principles

To find out more about specific products that are mentioned in this video please use the links below:

Lacie Rugged Drives

This is your standard on-set hard drive, they come in many flavours from USB3 to Thunderbolt.



Onyx

A software utility that is used to run regular maintenance on your Mac as well as providing options to tweak hidden parameters. There is one version of Onyx per major macOS Version, be sure to download the correct version for your OS.

Shotput Pro

This is simple and effective data management software. Highly customisable in terms of offload presets, quality checksums and a complete workhorse for on-set data management particularly for Standard TVCs.

Silverstack

Think of this as a more advanced version of Shotput Pro, it offers a lot more features such as customisable reports, metadata management, playback within the software, transcoding, etc. but it does have a significantly steeper price tag. Great for longer form productions such as Feature Films, TV Series or Longer TVCs.

Kanex Adaptor

This handy little adaptor will turn your Thunderbolt 1 or Thunderbolt 2 Port into a USB3 Port. I use two of these units when I need to utilise 4x USB3 Ports on my MacBook Pro, each device has it’s own port which minimises speed loss.

Data Management Keyboard Shortcuts

These are my favourite and most used keyboard shortcuts when data wrangling.

Command + I = Get Info

Command + W = Close Finder Window (Or Many Other Windows)

Command + Delete = Send Selected Item to Trash

I hope you found this informative and helpful, if you have any questions please feel free to ask in the comments section below!