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Is It Your Responsibility to Archive a Project?

November 1, 2018

Multiple members have recently written asking the same question: Is it a colorists' responsibility to archive media and project files?


Series

From The MailBag Episode 60

Blow Away Media After A Project Or Archive It?

We’re not quite sure why, but over the past month, we’ve gotten about a dozen questions on archiving from members and per a recent trend – also from our own Dan Moran.  The gist of these questions is:  ‘do you guys feel like it’s your responsibility to archive a project’s media?  How about the project file?’

Responsibility… it’s an interesting word when it comes to archiving as it implies more than it just being a good idea!  As a team, we’ve had hundreds of situations over the years where not archiving footage and project files has come back to bite us, but is archiving really a responsibility?

In our 60th Mailbag episode, we discuss archiving and explore how colorists and finishers should handle it.

Archiving Just Because?

If you’re like many colorists and finishers, you’ll archive footage and projects ‘just because’.  What I mean is that you envision at some point in the future, the project and or footage being useful.  You might also just archive footage and projects because you’ve learned it’s a good survival skill in a world where clients can bite your head off if you didn’t do it!

In this episode, we discuss reasons to just archive no matter what, but also reasons to do so to later turn restoring data into a revenue stream.

What to Archive?

If you subscribe to the ‘archive just because’ school of thought – what do you archive?  We explore backing up the essentials like project files & client supplied media, but also discuss offering clients the ability to archive all of their original camera footage, graphics, other project files and more – for a fee of course.

While you might be nervous about taking on the responsibility of additional archiving duties, it can be a good revenue stream with limited manual labor.

Do You Want Team Mixing Light To Answer A Question?

Remember, if you have questions that you’d like to get an opinion on please use the contact form.

Your questions can be aesthetic, technical or even client related. We’d love to hear from you, and your question might make future episodes of From The MailBag.

Enjoy the MailBag!

-Robbie

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