Workflow - Conversions
 

I have EX-1 and both Canon DSLR's, 5D and 7D.
The Canon's need to be converted. The 5D conformed from 30p to 29.97
and then to 24p for some projects. So I have original footage, Conformed 29.97 footage, and as I said some of that gets converted to 24p. So that's three versions of the same file.

Question is? What do I keep and back up? Original footage? Or converted.
If I don't really have this straight I'd love to hear strategies for conversion and backup.

If you conform footage it does not change footage only how many FPS it plays at.

So any fps will be re-conformable to anything else.

As far as archiving goes, I always archive original footage ie EX3 as native BPAV folder or sometimes .mov version. 5D I archive original .mov (h.264) no loss it is already very compressed, you don't make it better by converting to a better codec.

When I work with files I use Prores422 HQ 90% of the time. It is faster better quality for cc etc. But there is no reason to archive footage as such, more space needed. It is better to archive in many forms, DVD, Bluray ,multi HD's, RAID level 5 etc.

I am still waiting for "holo" storage that sounded so promising a few years ago, if that finally comes to fruition we will probably do everything as uncompressed 4k or maybe 12k. But that has not happened yet, so keeping things as small as possible w/o loosing quality makes sense to me.