Archiving Your Video Project

4 Terrabyte drive from G-Technology

When clients hire our Orlando video production company, they’re getting more than just a company that aims a camera and presses record.  They’re getting a partner they can trust. 

After we finish a project and the video has been approved we archive the work.  We take all the footage that has been captured, along with the graphics, animation, any narration and music backgrounds…essentially all the files that are imperative to the project and we store that on an external hard drive for safekeeping.  We not only put it on one back-up hard drive but a second external device as well.  It only makes sense.  What if something happened to that drive?  That’s why we go the extra mile.

Over the years our post-production team have grown to trust names such as Lacie, G-Tech and Western Digital as makers of high quality storage devices for our valuable media files.  Each drive is catalogued with the clients project files so that we can keep track of where a project resides and bring it up quickly when we need to make a change or revise a video.  It’s our policy that we do not hand over the drive and the files at the end of the project.  We keep that in our possession so that we can manage the project and files for future use.   

What does this mean to a client?  Well it provides peace of mind for one thing.  Your video will be available if you need to make a change or if you want to use some of the existing footage down the road for a future project.  We try to check-in periodically with clients if they’ve become inactive to gauge whether we need to hold on to their project before any media is deleted.  Typically we hold on to all assets of a project for a minimum of three years.  No footage is deleted until we hear from a client.   

It also provides a cost savings to our clients.  By keeping the footage organized we are essentially creating a video library that we can continue to build on and repurpose for future projects.  Say for example we are producing a three-minute  marketing video in Orlando and we already have footage from 2013 of employees in a call center.  The video we’re currently producing requires a few shots of employees in that same call center; if nothing has been changed there’s no reason to shoot additional footage in that area!  It also enables us to update videos easily.  Another example…a client has in their archives a new employee orientation video from 2014, it’s two years later and there have been a few changes but nothing major.  It’s easy enough to take the existing video from the drives, reshoot the open, and update any graphics detailing the changes. It saves the project time, money and the work is produced that much faster.

Archiving projects and saving media to a second drive is just one way we build trust in a client relationship.  Having the know-how and being able to offer suggestions to our clients and find ways to save them money is also a difference maker.