What's the right level of backing up for EX1 footage?

A

andrew00

Well-known member
Hi,

So amongst the jobs that I do, I often film live music. Last year I filmed a big festival, and did the same this year. Last year's project is done - edited, on dvd/web etc, I shouldn't be going back to it unless there's any random and specific reason to that I can't forsee.

Currently the files for last year are sitting on my hard drive - all 400 GB of them - at the time of the festival I burnt the BPAV's to Blu-Ray (LG burner that works on Mac) so I have the original camera files.

However since then there's been all the edits etc. I don't particularly like having 400 GB of files on my HD just doing nothing.

So how should I best store this? What's my obligation here?

Should I burn the edited files to BluRay and just keep them as this big bulk of discs? Bare in mind discs aren't exactly cheap at £5 ish a pop that's be 16 discs if I could fit 25 gb per disc, and of course you never can, it's more like 23.3 and even then I'd prob not want to span discs. I don't particularly fancy spending an extra £100 on blu ray discs after the event.

So what do I do? Just leave the files on the external hd for ever? Certainly hd's are cheaper than discs but it seems a bit of a waste to have it there unused forever.

Cheers,
A
 
Your obligation should be stated in your T+C

I would go for a formal version of 'I will deliver this once'

My stills photography and now moving images business we keep everything shot on two HDs in two locations even though we only guarentee to deliver it once to the client

HDS are cheap my first 1TB cost more than £1000,

Raid seems complex and pointless it is not an archiving solution and however good a single computer is it can be stolen burnt etc

I imagine online backup will occur overtime with drops in prices and increases in bandwidth

S
 
What's "T+C"?

Some people are building the cost of a hard drive (for archiving) into their original bid. When the project is done, they just stick the hard drive on the shelf for future revises, duplication, etc....

In our case, we're archiving both the BAPV files and the entire project, all to portable hard drives.
 
why archive to a hard drive when you can save files to a bluray?
Isn't a Bluray disc cheaper than a hard drive?
And it takes up less space on the shelf.
 
Bokes said:
why archive to a hard drive when you can save files to a bluray?
Isn't a Bluray disc cheaper than a hard drive?
And it takes up less space on the shelf.
Click to expand...

For 400gb of space, a hard drive is a lot easier and about the same cost or less depending on which BD you buy.

I raise this issue with every client I have now. I tell them they can bring me a hard drive when the project is complete or we can put one in the quote. This is the digital world and people are well aware of the need to backup.

With HD, this gets magnified.

I agree about the RAID setups being limited and I have gone to a shadow system where I have two drives for everything. One for working and one that is an active clone that gets updated daily.

I also keep the camera files on two drives until the project is complete and then I move all of the project files to cold storage, often stored with the client as it is their project.

Drives fail and you do not want to lose camera files since we do not have the tapes around anymore.

But we can not be expected to carry around old projects on our systems forever. So I think the clients should store their precious files and bring them back if they want to change anyhting in the future.
 
ya, drives are so cheap. put the drive on a shelf and buy another. why spend days backing up to some other media when a 1TB drive is $100? not worth your time i would think.
 
Yup...Agree. That's what we do. The $100+ for 1TB says buy the HDs and put 'em on the shelf. We let the client know when we might be cleaning house after about a 1 or 2 years...They can either buy the HD from us or we can transfer it to their medium... and then we erase and re-use the drive.
 
FrankC said:
Yup...Agree. That's what we do. The $100+ for 1TB says buy the HDs and put 'em on the shelf. We let the client know when we might be cleaning house after about a 1 or 2 years...They can either buy the HD from us or we can transfer it to their medium... and then we erase and re-use the drive.
Click to expand...
Is it not possible to save your timeline. record the in out points of the source footage and the clip names etc. then if worse comes to worse and your client wants to change something then you simply load the time line into your NLE and it will ask for the original files which you have on your blu ray disks to be loaded.(like batch digitizing but with digital clips not tapes) what i am saying is just save the timeline info not the footage
 
sadude said:
Is it not possible to save your timeline. record the in out points of the source footage and the clip names etc. then if worse comes to worse and your client wants to change something then you simply load the time line into your NLE and it will ask for the original files which you have on your blu ray disks to be loaded.(like batch digitizing but with digital clips not tapes) what i am saying is just save the timeline info not the footage
Click to expand...

save it all. project file. render files. exports. any other project files and assets from say, after effects, motion, color, whatever. save all that crap to a drive and shelf it. if they come back to your a year later, everything is exactly how you left it.

the problem with blu ray or dvd backup is that if you ever did need to revisit the project, you would need to spend a lot of time transferring everything from blu ray back onto a workable drive. can't edit from blu ray. i don't know about you but if i eat up 2 hours of my time transferring data, i would have been better off spending the c-note for a drive.
 
cheezweezl said:
save it all. project file. render files. exports. any other project files and assets from say, after effects, motion, color, whatever. save all that crap to a drive and shelf it. if they come back to your a year later, everything is exactly how you left it.

the problem with blu ray or dvd backup is that if you ever did need to revisit the project, you would need to spend a lot of time transferring everything from blu ray back onto a workable drive. can't edit from blu ray. i don't know about you but if i eat up 2 hours of my time transferring data, i would have been better off spending the c-note for a drive.
Click to expand...

My Nle uses 3 drives to edit. one holds the program, one holds the video footage and the other holds the rendering. I am abit lazy with my after effects and 3d animations in that i leave the pics on the same drive with my program software. I think i should get into the habbit now of using external drives for holding absolutely all my pics, animations, footage and i should also set the rendering to be done on that drive. Is this possible?
 
sadude said:
My Nle uses 3 drives to edit. one holds the program, one holds the video footage and the other holds the rendering. I am abit lazy with my after effects and 3d animations in that i leave the pics on the same drive with my program software. I think i should get into the habbit now of using external drives for holding absolutely all my pics, animations, footage and i should also set the rendering to be done on that drive. Is this possible?
Click to expand...

That's how I do it using Final Cut Pro, After Effects, Photoshop, Illustrator, Zaxwerks Invigerator 3D, etc... Everything is in one project folder. Then when I'm done, I just archive that folder.
 
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