Digital video archive strategy
 

Apologies in advance if I’ve placed this in the wrong forum: I wasn’t sure where was most appropriate. But since I’m on a Mac and using FCP I’ll try here.

I’m trying to create a sensible video archiving strategy from scratch before things get out of hand and I’d welcome any advice.

As a stills photographer my workflow results in an archive consisting of:
RAW DNG files
Master prints in 16bit TIFF format
JPG versions of the master prints for distribution

There are 3 sets of everything. The working archive in my office; one set at home; a third set at a remote location that I can back-up to/download from over the net.

This works well and I’d like to replicate it for video, but I’m confused about exactly what and how much I should be archiving. ISTM that the capture clips are the equivalent of the DNG files; and final .mov/mpeg file is the equivalent of the JPGs. But what is the [sort-of] equivalent of the master prints? The FCP files? And if so which to save? It doesn’t seem necessary to save rendered files, for example.

I want to keep the archive all digital. Although some of what I shoot is tape, it will soon be all digital capture, and at the other end of the process I don’t have any particular need to output to tape.

Thanks in advance,

Jeremy Nicholl

I'd say it's a matter of how instant of access you want to your archived data. I always keep the final quicktime movie, a program stream, transport and elementary stream mpeg as well as ac-3 audio clip for DVD and a web version in .wmv format. The FCP document is essential if you ever intend to edit the piece in the future, but I always scrap my render files as they take up way too much space to keep with the rest of the files. Other than that the raw MXF data (shooting with HVX200), the ProRes422 proxies and any image media, audio files or proxy video used in other programs (i.e. Motion) as well as the project files for any other software I used in the editing process along with their rastered video/audio files.

Use Media Manager to back up your project. It will create new files of your project with only the actual media you used from your source files. Back this up to an external hard drive, and burn in to DVD-R or DVD-R_DL (depending on the size) and store off site.

The people over at The Pixel Corps did an episode of MacBreak Studio about the Media Manager. It's an 18 minute Quicktime file that can be downloaded. They go though just about every aspect of the manager.

PixelCorps.tv

Thanks for all the information. Just what I needed to know.

Jeremy Nicholl