Editors & Colorists – How To Properly Archive Your (Premiere Pro) Projects

Ensure future success by archiving your projects correctly

Whether you’re a colorist or an editor, creating an efficient and effective archival strategy can make you a hero with clients and earn extra income when the core job is completed. In this Insight, you’ll learn your various archiving options and how to correctly archive Premiere Pro projects.

Contents

Part 1: Archiving 101 for Editors and Colorists

Mixing Light is a tremendous resource for colorists and editors, but since you might only work in one of those roles, I wanted to highlight an important difference as we explore this topic.

If you’re a colorist, you’re likely the last pair of hands the project passes through, and you create the final deliverables. However, you may only have access to the project’s final consolidation plus the deliverables you created.

If you’re an editor, you might be tasked with archiving the entirety of the original ‘offline’ project and potentially all of the final graded deliverables.

The principles in this Insight are the same, but the scope of the files in question might be slightly different.

Who handles the archiving?

The first question you must answer regarding archiving: Whose responsibility is it to archive the project?

That’s an essential question that needs to be addressed at the beginning of the project. If it’s not your responsibility, and you won’t be assuming it, then state that clearly in writing somewhere.

Otherwise, disaster could strike if the client or producer has a different operating assumption.

In the Mixing Light Mailbag issue on this topic from 2018, colorist (and Mixing Light co-founder) Dan Moran shared a useful statement he adds to his Terms and Conditions (you have a set of those, right? If not, check out this Office Hours) that he sends to every client before they work together.

“Unless otherwise agreed, all media will be removed from my system within 28 days of completion.”

That clause proved vital when a client expected Dan to keep all media ‘in perpetuity’ and wanted a change six months later. In writing, it’s a good idea to state that you don’t accept responsibility for archiving a project if this is your chosen strategy. And a better idea to boldly emphasize that statement.

More Responsibility = More Money

Alternatively, you can opt of responsibility for maintaining an archive copy of the project and charging the client for that service. There are several benefits to doing this:

Designing an Archive

If you decide to run an archive and charge for it, you’ll need a robust and reliable system to do so to a professional standard.

Here are some factors to consider and explicitly state in writing:

Charging a line-item fee attached to the project is likely the best way to bill for the archive rather than an ongoing annual fee. (Do you want to chase that down, year after year?)

Once you’ve determined how you’re handling the archiving and how you’re billing for it, the next decision is the type of archival system you will implement. You might customize this to the client or offer one type of system as a take-it-or-leave-it line item.

Broadly speaking, you can choose between physical hardware solutions or remote ‘cloud-based’ solutions. Let’s start with physical systems.

Physical Archival Storage Systems

Spinning disks for archiving?

Spinning disks is not the best solution for storing files for the long term.

Firstly, if you don’t spin them up regularly, they degrade just sitting there on the shelf. Plus, who wants to pull files from a FireWire 400 drive in 2024 – assuming you still have the correct cable adapters?

But having a large, cheap, preferably RAID-arrayed drive to store client projects for the medium term (a few months to a year) is a useful middle ground. It moves the storage load off of your fast, work-horse storage and onto an accessible location for any ‘oh one more thing’ updates that pop up a few months later.

LTO for the win, mostly

Related Mixing Light Insights

What’s your archiving strategy?

Hit the comments with your archival workflow and client-focused approach! Let me know if I missed any Pros or Cons of each approach. Do you have another approach?

– Jonny