Archive Strategy for Wedding Videography using Final Cut Studio

[Amir Abed]

You can use the media manger to keep only what is being used in the timeline. That will free up lots of space. Something I dont understand is why you’re keeping everything. It makes sense to do so if a client wants to make changes but if a client just wants another DVD copy then why don’t you just keep the DVD files and trash the rest?

[Ben Holmes]

If you kept the DVD image it would be no more than 9Gb, more like 4gb I’m sure.

Media managing a timeline as ProRes files would give a lot of latitude as well – probably get each project down to 50gb

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[Kris Merkel]

I know you said that you do not want to keep buying 1TB drives, but, drives are fairly inexpensive and compact. If you bill for the clients drive in your costs. You can back up whole projects and use a drive dock to mount a disk if you ever need to access data that you have moved off your machine.

[Walter Soyka]

There’s a computer storage saying: there are those who have experienced data loss, and those who will experience data loss. Hard drives fail — it’s a matter of when, not if. How confident can you be with only copy of a piece of media on a hard drive on a shelf?

A lot of production companies have started using LTO4 tape archives in their “tapeless” workflows, but the price tag is pretty steep.

If you must continue with hard drives, first minimize what you must store as the other posters have suggested. Spin up your drives from time to time. Mark them with the date they were purchased, loaded, and last spun. Move your data to new drives as the older ones age. Keep duplicate copies on drives from another manufacturer, stored in a separate location, or maybe spanned DVD or Blu-ray backups.

Walter Soyka
Principal & Designer at Keen Live
Motion Graphics, Widescreen Events, Presentation Design, and Consulting
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[Nary Von]

Thanks for the replies.

After reading your comments, my initial plan is to keep two things:
1. disc images of every disc I sell to clients, for a minimum of 5 years (4-5 GB each) backed up on and off site with external hard drives. In case the customer wants to buy another copy down the road.
2. original .mov video that was transfered to the computer with Final Cut Pro, with .fcp file for 1 month. In case changes need to be made to the video. Then I’ll delete these files forever after 1 month.

Here’s the wording I use in my contract, so my customer’s are aware of this:
“Changes to the DVD(s) and its contents must be requested within 1 month following receipt. Due to our archive procedure, change requests made after 1 month are not guaranteed possible. DVD(s) are archived and are able to be reproduced for a minimum of 5 years from your wedding date.”

I’ll delete all FCP rendered files, exported .mov from FCP, Compressor files .m2v & .ac3. I can always recreate these from the original .mov and accompanied .fcp file. That should free up a lot of space, I can handle 5-20 GB of .img files for each project after a month rolls by.

The 2 things I’ll keep will be on my 2TB external drives (I said 1TB before by mistake). I also keep a copy on my redundant onsite 2TB hard drives. In addition, I keep a copy offsite as well, in case I have a fire or something. So each disc image is saved in 3 different places. I’ll fire up the drives occasionally and replace when they go bad down the road.

@Amir: I don’t think media manager would work for me, if it’s my videos, I like to keep everything anyway. If it’s a client, I offer raw footage DVDs, so all the footage is used and nothing would be weeded out. I’ll take your advice on keeping only DVD files….like in my case, .img disc images

@Ben: Yeah, I like the .img idea…

@Kris: Why didn’t I know that drive docks existed? I just dropped $170 on a bunch of 2TB external hard drives. I haven’t checked yet, but buying standard hard drives that you can stick in your closet and pop in a dock sounds a lot easier and maybe cheaper than what I’m doing now with external drives stacked on the other side of my wall out of sight with cables coming through the wall. I need to look into drive docks next time I need to purchase some storage.

@Walter: Yes, I agree, they will fail, someday. I have them in 3 places (one of them is offsite). I’ll take your advice on checking the drives from time to time.

-Nary

[Giuliano Bausano]

Why don’t you give/gift also a bluray with a backup or with all the recorded files.mov to clients, saying that this will be a MASTER copy he/she will never have to loose or he/she will loose every chances to recover data?