Archiving

When you're in the world of tapeless post production, there are no tapes to have for archiving purposes. So you must back up your data on some sort of storage media. As I mentioned in a previous post, if you use Final Cut Pro to transcode to ProRes, you'll discover that your file sizes might not always correspond to the quality your camera recorded it at (i.e. the lowest quality 1440x1080 clips in AVCHD world become significantly larger than the highest quality 720p files). So if you back you your ProRes files you'll need a significant amount of storage space. But what about just backing up your AVCHD files?

This process is actually easy. What I'm doing is creating a folder on my storage RAID that is called AVCHD Card Back Ups. Within this folder I create a folder for each project. If I only used one card for that project, I'll simply copy the PRIVATE folder from the card to this project's folder. If there were multiple cards used, I'll create a set of folders with the simple name Card 1, 2, 3, etc. Copy each card's PRIVATE folder to their respective folders and that's it.

Be sure to keep a copy of your Final Cut project and one day, when the client asks for changes, you fire up that project, open up Log and Transfer, point it to appropriate PRIVATE folder(s) and re-transcode back to ProRes. The file naming scheme should remain the same. Obviously it's important to keep your original ProRes files named exactly how Final Cut named them, so when you re-transcode you can reconnect to the right files.

The end result is you back-up the significantly smaller AVCHD files and blow away the much larger ProRes ones. You'll be able to back up a lot more projects to the same disk as a result.

PS - I won't even get in to the idea that if you archive your files to a standard hard drive you'll need to be sure to power it up and let the platters spin periodically to prevent data loss. Do a google search and you'll see a lot of discussion about this fact.