Archiving footage
 

I have a question. I've read a lot lately on these forums about the usage of uncompressed video to produce shows and other footage. My question is how do you go about archiving that kind of information? Do you get it finished, then only save the original footage it all came from (which still would probably be multiple GBs in size) or do you simply keep adding more and more HD space?

Thanks!

I output the final project to tape, and keep all the source tapes. I backup all music, stills, graphics and the project file to DVDs.

It is a waste of space to save all the uncompressed footage when I have the source tapes.

Michael,

I make short films. I shoot on miniDV (4:1:1), capture, deartifact the footage to 4:4:4, and save that as uncompressed AVI. I do all color correction and editing in uncompressed. My final output is DVD, but I also keep the final edit uncompressed AVI around. I burn that DVD-R as data. Fortunately, most of my short films have been short enough to fit on a single DVD-R. One was long enough I had to zip it, and that fit on a DVD-R.

I'm about to get started editing a much longer project, and I'm scratching my head about how to handle all of the footage uncompressed. A couple large new hard drives is in order, but I'm not sure how I'll archive the final edit in the end. Maybe just keep it on a hard drive, and toss that (gently) on the shelf?

Josh

I've been keeping all my avi captures on hard drive and recently putting them on DVDs. I've got several large hard drives and it is a challenge to manage all the footage.

One of my key tasks is to time code all our footage and break them down into clips of about 10 to 20 seconds each. I'm getting about 80 avi clips on a DVD this way.

And of course I keep all the original DV tapes.

Regarding archiving a final production long video in avi format that doesn't all fit on one DVD, you could put it in your software and cut it up into sections and then burn the sections onto as many different DVDs as needed. If you ever needed to put it all back together again, it's just a matter of breaking out the DVDs, copying the sections back onto your hard drive and putting them together in order in your software.