Protect Your Footage
Our ingestion process to minimize risk
ALWAYS HAVE ENOUGH MEDIA
You never want to get into the position of formatting cards in the middle of a shoot. It becomes stressful and introduces points of failure when you're running a small crew. The price of SD cards have dropped drastically over the past few years and we now make it a policy to carry enough for a full day of shooting with formatting. They also serve as a second copy until we're able to back everything up twice.
Once we fill a card, we’ll start backing it up to a laptop as soon as possible. If we’re on the go we’ll place it onto a Pelican Hard Case that we protect with our life.
Before calling it a wrap for the day and departing from the final location, we back up all our footage using the software HEDGE FOR MAC. It performs a “check-sum” meaning it analyzes the data of each file that’s transferred so you can be certain it’s copied perfectly. We love Hedge because the paid version actually works faster than the Mac OS finder and the interface makes it easy to copy multiple sources to multiple destinations very simply to minimize human error.
I’ve upgraded my laptop with a 1TB SSD so that we don’t have to wait too long to back everything up. If that’s full we also have an external SSD, just so we don't have to wait too long on site for initial transfer. SSD's are also physically more resiliant. Once it’s done we preview the folders to make sure we didn't miss any cards. Then we're off!
For organizational purposes, we’ll then simplify and combine folders for camera’s that used multiple cards and rename the footage. We use PATH FINDER 7’S batch rename tool and the following template.
TEMPLATE “DATE_PROJECT/CLIENT_DEVICE_001”
EXAMPLE “010117_MWENDOPROMO_FS5_001”
Once we arrive at the office later that day, we immediately transfer to our active project raid and a secondary backup drive that will be taken off site. We’ll update the off-site backup again once the project is complete and ready to archive. Once we’ve made those two backup’s we know we’re good to clear the laptop and cards for the next shoot.
When on a multiway shoot we’ll bring along at least 2 or 3 portable USB 3 4TB hard drives to back up to each night. Overnight and when traveling we store them in different locations to minimize theft or loss.
ALWAYS HAVE TWO COPIES
Would love to hear how you protect your footage. What safeguards or best practices have you found to be useful?
LINKS
- PELICAN SD Card Case
- Hedge for Mac - Transfer Software
- Pathfinder 7 - Finder replacement used for batch renaming
- Our Folder Structure
- External SSD
- 4TB Hard Drive
