Storing your footage when completed !!!

DIGITALJB21

DIGITALJB21

Member
When you have completed your work in the timeline and have outputed to DVD. Where do you keep all of your timeline work. Do most people send it to trash because the job is done? Our do you save it to a separate hard drive? What's the point of holding on to it if it is done? This footage is taking up a lot of space. JB
 
You never know when you might come back to a project to do some re-edits, drop portions onto a reel or re-use for stock footage, etc. There are many ways to archive a project- put all footage onto a hard drive housed in a firewire case then pull the drive out of the case and put into an anti-static bag. This is decent and relatively inexpensive but not high on reliability.

Then you get up to the level of media specifically designed for archival storage such as LTO-4 drives. Not cheap to buy the drive but great for long-term storage and very reliable.

Or you could just trash everything- but that would be kinda wasting all your hard work, wouldn't it? :beer:



-Noah
 
I completely agree with NoahK, on all points. I've been using LTO since April 2006 (LTO-2 first, then LTO-3, soon to go to LTO-4), never lost a frame. I probably keep more stuff than I should but that's because you get spoiled . . . it's just easier to back everything up, raw files and the entire project. Hard drives are still the most economical solution--particularly if you don't keep everything you shoot. Nice thing about tape is that the price of this technology is coming down, probably more due to the economy than anything else--keep your eye on eBay (but don't buy re-furbished stuff like I made the mistake of doing once).
 
Anyone using the Sony PDW-U1 on XDCAM yet? I'm waiting for the Mac write back firmware, but plan on ordering shortly for easy ingest.
 
We fortunately have clients that keep coming back. :) Since we will sometimes revisit projects from 3 or more years ago we keep a lot of projects on the edit bay AND on a backup drive. We've never lost any data...Knock on wood!

If I'm confident a client/project will not come back, i.e. a one time activity, I usually keep the footage, GFX and edit lists on BU drives for about a year.

I swear this has happened twice. After my anal delays of saving stuff, we finally dumped footage and within a week we had the client call and want to do more with it. The first time it was the DAY after dumping the footage.
Ya just never know. :)

The LTO option sounds interesting. I'll have to check on that.
 
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