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Clients & tapeless video retention
Going to a tapeless workflow has meant a geometric increase in storage needs. In the past, it was no big deal if a client returned three years later and needed to recut some footage we shot. We could just dig through storage boxes of DV tape. But now, it’s pretty expensive to keep buying Fibre Channel RAIDs to keep everything online or nearline. Burning camera memory cards to DVD/Blu-Ray is incredibly slow and error prone.
I was at Motion 09 last October and in one of the sessions, a speaker mentioned this novel idea — a client contract that puts a time limit on stored footage. It went something like this: At the onset of any job, clients sign an agreement that the production company would hang on to their media files for 1 year and after that it’s deleted. They could pay an upfront storage fee (which would essentially be the cost of a 2TB hard drive) in which case it was held onto to 5 years.
Anyone have a contract like that? I’m not sure how to word it exactly.
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23 Replies
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We give them 30 days and then promise to delete it, which we never do because the moment you do, the phone will ring and it will be them wanting to know if they can book a week, at full rate, for editing the old footage. If you keep it on the drive, they will NEVER call.
>>> Note: this is a serious post with a touch of humor thrown in >>>
Steve Wargo
Tempe, Arizona
It’s a dry heat!Sony HDCAM F-900 & HDW-2000/1 deck
5 Final Cut (not quite PRO) systems
Sony HVR-M25 HDV deck
2-Sony EX-1 HD .Ask me how to Market Yourself using Send Out Cards
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We keep everything – or at least a trimmed project. Only problem is drives you have not used in a while tend to die. This has actually happened twice with seagate drives – Seagate will replace the drive but not the data.
Just last week a client asked for an AVI of the final edit from a 2007 project. Thanks to my handy excel I knew just where to go.
Mike Cohen
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Sorry for harping on a subject discussed by me before, but…
While it’s still necessary to archive final shows and graphic elements, the simple choice for us was to go XDCam instead of P2 or one of the other card-based forms of recording. For about $21 apiece we have 23gig / 1 hr+ camera original disks sitting on the shelf. To me this seems like a major advantage.
As to archiving with hard drives, which we do for some things, it’s important to remember that drives fail. And, I believe, that drives which sit un-used for long periods of time, tend to fail more than ones which are occasionally spun up. So for data which is truly valuable (especially to a client who is trusting you to maintain said data) it’s probably best to have it backed up to more than one hard drive.
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Harrumph. Posted my response before seeing Mike’s.
It’s not Seagate or any other specific brand of drive that fails, it’s ALL drives… eventually. Drives are still rated in MTBF hours. That’s “Mean Time Between Failure” – the AVERAGE time at which they will lose data integrity. In other words HALF fail before that number of hours and half fail after. As far as I know no company has yet to develop a hard drive which will NEVER fail.
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There a couple corporations I work with who chose XDCam over P2 for the same reason Nick mentioned. It takes man hours to manage and maintain all the data – versus logging the disc into the library. And if you need to revisit a project a couple years from now, you can grab the clips you need.
In answer to the original question, we charge a fee of about $150 per project to archive to LTO tape. Every project goes through this process and the line item for Project Archiving is never questioned because we talk about that ahead of time. Data Tape backup is something the IT sector has been using for ages. It is reliable and tested. An LTO-4 tape will hold 800GB of data which allows multiple projects to be stored on one tape. Desktop or internal tape drives are fairly cheap and tapes are about $60 right now. As with any media, there is risk of failure, so multiple tapes are suggested.
As far as storing data on HDD (Hard Disk Drive), you don’t need to ask too many people about their experiences with crashed drives to know this is NOT an practical and efficient solution. There is nothing wrong with having a pile of HDD on the shelf with project material. But don’t use this as your only archive/backup method. And if you don’t spin them them up occasionally, don’t expect the data to be there in a couple years.
https://www.larryjordan.biz/articles/lj_hard_disk_warning.htmlEd
Avid and FCP Preditor
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Anything worth doing at all, is worth doing well.
– Philip Dormer Stanhope, Earl of Chesterfield -
Technically, isn’t XDCam a blu ray disk?
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Yes, XDCam is a blu-ray disc. And…?
Avid and FCP Preditor
_________________________________________________
Anything worth doing at all, is worth doing well.
– Philip Dormer Stanhope, Earl of Chesterfield -
[Mark Suszko] “Technically”
Yes, kind of. The technology is the same but the camera deck and the desktop drive won’t play a consumer Blu-Ray and a consumer Blue-Ray won’t go into the XDCam drives. Remember the short-lived DVD-ROM disks, circa 1999? If you took the shell off you had a type of DVD, but you couldn’t put a regular DVD into the drive, first because it needed the shell to fit and second because it was a different format from a standard DVD. The more things change, the more they remain the same.
(At least that’s my understanding of the difference between Blu-Ray and XDCam. No doubt there are others here who know far more than I do.)
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We chose XDCAM for this reason as well. They are developing a 100 GB disk – nearly 200 minutes of HD footage on a single disk. Given the amount of data that can be stored on a single disk shelf space isn’t a problem.
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My sneaky way of suggesting that BluRay is not a bad idea for long term storage.
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