I am wondering what others are doing in terms of archiving old wedding footage. Are you saving the raw files, transcoded, or both? Do you save the project files of the edit or just the final edit output? I plan on keeping data on a blu-ray disk and hard drive for redundant backup but would like to discuss which files are important enough to save. Looking forward to hearing opinions.

This is one of the questions my friends and I have been discussing: Long term storage, media & format obsolesence with this new solid state work flow. Right now we give our clients all the original miniDV tapes for archiving and I'm keeping an ISO image of the master DVD on a Western Digital 2TB NAS drive with the Raid mirroring.

One of the approaches I'm looking at for when I upgrade to either a Sony NX5 of Canon XF300 is this: Have in the contract that raw footage is not maintained long term.

Give the clients the option of

a. buying the SD/CF cards at cost + some % with the original footage on them.
b. buying a 500GB external hard drive with all the original footage
c. buying something like a Western Digital HD Media player with the master file and original files

As far as master files... I'm not sure what the best way is to do that with HD and Blu Ray effectively... but i'm sure long term storing of HD master files would need to be priced into any new contracting terms!

I can store a lot of 4GB SD ISO images on 1 TB.... not sure how many HD weddings would fit...