How to Archive Your Post-Production Files

Video Transcript

"TRAVIS JOHNS: Hi. I'm Travis Johns for Expert Village, and I'm going to talk to you about archiving. Obviously, at the end of a project, you're going to have a lot of media, a lot of files and that's going to take up a lot of space in your hard drives. So, whether or not you have external drives or not, it's important to have a backup anyway. So, what you want to do is basically go through your files and create duplicates whether you copy them to a separate drive, whether you burn DVDs at this media, however you end up doing it, you want to make sure that you've got two copies at all times. Once you have established that both copies are good, that all the file information is not corrupt, then you can go ahead and delete the media on your main drives since you can free up some space for the next project that's coming up. Archiving is also important because sometimes you get a call from a client two or three months down the line and they'll ask for a specific file, part of a project or something in between. You want to make sure that you've kept detailed records, you know where your archives are, they are organized by project, by name of the client, whatever make sense to you, so when that client asks you for the specific file, you can get them to it quickly and easily and not have to dig around for it costing you time and money. You should also make sure that you charge the client for any files that you're giving them after the fact. You had a project with them a few months ago but now, they need something else, that's going to take you time. You have to burn it, how much is the media costing that you're putting the files on. All of these things should be taken to account so that at the very end, you get treated fairly."