Production agency video storage/management

JAHpow

JAHpow

Active member
For those who currently or have previously worked at a video production company, how do you manage/store footage?

My coworker and I have been quickly filling our Lacie 48tb 6big drives with footage and we're going to be in need of more space. We have a couple of avenues to aquire more space, but we would like to know how a formal production company manages their raw video footage.

We're an in-house video team, we don't have formal agency/big-budget experience. But we would like to know how a larger team deals with footage as they shoot it, manage it, and archive it.
 
14283470:skiP.E.I. said:
cloud storage might be a good option.
Click to expand...

Not even remotely true for real video work. Cloud is great for some things including casual consumer photo/video storage, documents/etc, but when you're dealing with XXX(X?) terabytes of footage its just not a reasonable option even w/ a rock solid fiber line and hefty budget

OP I'm also in the same boat of frustratingly maxing out my current methods of storage and looking to take the next leap into some sort of bigger NAS system, curious at what replies we see
 
It sounds like you are starting to do the volume of work where investing in a bigger RAID system makes sense. The director I work with on video stuff has a two different RAIDs (RAID 5) one 48tb and one 60tb along with a bunch of random standalone 2-10 tb drives for extra redundancy (I think this is a carryover from before he invested in the big drives). One RAID is for all of his commercial work and a few documentary projects of varying length. The other is for the feature length doc project we are working on (that involves a huge archive of like 100,000 kodachrome slides, hours and hours of audio, thousands of pages of documents, and 30 hours or so of 8mm and 16mm film.)

They are a huge investment and what you buy will depend on what you need it for and your budget. He just has one Lacie and one G tech standalone, but if you are looking for one drive with everything on it and take on bigger productions then a small crew run and gun approach you may want to look into more complicated systems. I would probably recommend starting with a standalone of whatever size you need, but remember to match which RAID standard you want with the number of drives in the array.
 
14283614:84west said:
It sounds like you are starting to do the volume of work where investing in a bigger RAID system makes sense. The director I work with on video stuff has a two different RAIDs (RAID 5) one 48tb and one 60tb along with a bunch of random standalone 2-10 tb drives for extra redundancy (I think this is a carryover from before he invested in the big drives). One RAID is for all of his commercial work and a few documentary projects of varying length. The other is for the feature length doc project we are working on (that involves a huge archive of like 100,000 kodachrome slides, hours and hours of audio, thousands of pages of documents, and 30 hours or so of 8mm and 16mm film.)

They are a huge investment and what you buy will depend on what you need it for and your budget. He just has one Lacie and one G tech standalone, but if you are looking for one drive with everything on it and take on bigger productions then a small crew run and gun approach you may want to look into more complicated systems. I would probably recommend starting with a standalone of whatever size you need, but remember to match which RAID standard you want with the number of drives in the array.
Click to expand...

What do you guys do with all the raw footage, photos, docs, etc. once you're done with the project? Turn it over the client? Store it elsewhere?

Since we're in-house, we shoot for the company and we archive/store it all. We've been dumping footage once it reaches a certain age onto small external hard drives and they get put in a drawer. Our big lacies (I believe they're RAID 5 as well) have the most current footage on them. We upgraded cameras this year to C300 MkIIIs and we're using way more space.
 
14284584:JAHpow said:
What do you guys do with all the raw footage, photos, docs, etc. once you're done with the project? Turn it over the client? Store it elsewhere?

Since we're in-house, we shoot for the company and we archive/store it all. We've been dumping footage once it reaches a certain age onto small external hard drives and they get put in a drawer. Our big lacies (I believe they're RAID 5 as well) have the most current footage on them. We upgraded cameras this year to C300 MkIIIs and we're using way more space.
Click to expand...

Def don't turn it over to the client unless they've paid for ownership of the raw content. In my agreements they say that the clients own the final deliverables, and I own the raw content which can be purchased from me in the future, or used in projects for the cost of editing.
 
14285181:VT_scratch said:
Def don't turn it over to the client unless they've paid for ownership of the raw content. In my agreements they say that the clients own the final deliverables, and I own the raw content which can be purchased from me in the future, or used in projects for the cost of editing.
Click to expand...

That's what I thought, but then that still leads me to my question of- where does the raw footage go after the project is finished? Does it get deleted?
 
14285296:JAHpow said:
That's what I thought, but then that still leads me to my question of- where does the raw footage go after the project is finished? Does it get deleted?
Click to expand...

Yeah I'm not sure what people with TB on TB do. I work off external HDDs and I have backups of all of them. I save all footage and projects. That said I only have like 20 harddrives total so it's not an issue for me yet.
 
14285296:JAHpow said:
That's what I thought, but then that still leads me to my question of- where does the raw footage go after the project is finished? Does it get deleted?
Click to expand...

I know some people will always keep a master of each project, and delete raw files for projects of less value such as corporate work. Or just keep the raws of the best/favorite shots that are reel worthy. Depending how much data you're shooting a year you could do cleanups every 12-24 months.

I'm not sure if this is a thing people do but you could also look into charging clients for keeping files for certain amounts of time, that would help supplement the cost of needing more raids
 
14284584:JAHpow said:
What do you guys do with all the raw footage, photos, docs, etc. once you're done with the project? Turn it over the client? Store it elsewhere?

Since we're in-house, we shoot for the company and we archive/store it all. We've been dumping footage once it reaches a certain age onto small external hard drives and they get put in a drawer. Our big lacies (I believe they're RAID 5 as well) have the most current footage on them. We upgraded cameras this year to C300 MkIIIs and we're using way more space.
Click to expand...

So with commercial work it kind of depends on the project. A lot of what I get brought in to assist on is inward facing communications for corporate stuff. That footage all tends to get saved as the biggest clients are repeat clients. A lot of the video is not super easy to shoot (scheduling and then lighting and shooting industrial automation stuff is a two person job plus whatever engineer they have to assign to us to make sure we know what we are looking at) and will occasionally get licensed for other internal and occasionally outward facing use. For more just quick corporate event and local art kind of stuff a lot of that doesn't need to get saved once the final video is approved as there isn't much of a point as even a future project will not need it. (although knowing the director he may have it all somewhere anyways)

When it comes to the documentary project archival material I have no idea what will happen with it. That decision is up to the director and the family a lot of the material belongs too. Certainly nothing will get thrown away, but even the digital archive (never-mind physical) is just a massive amount of material.

I guess at the end of the day I would look at storage as kind of a recurring expense and decide what to save or not based on how likely it is that the raw video and audio will continue to help you make money. Obviously for personal work you may choose to save a little more, but you are paying for that in needing to buy another or a bigger drive sooner.
 
14286639:LukasSchroeder said:
I know some people will always keep a master of each project, and delete raw files for projects of less value such as corporate work. Or just keep the raws of the best/favorite shots that are reel worthy. Depending how much data you're shooting a year you could do cleanups every 12-24 months.

I'm not sure if this is a thing people do but you could also look into charging clients for keeping files for certain amounts of time, that would help supplement the cost of needing more raids
Click to expand...

This is in general pretty solid advice. I will say that corporate work can sometimes be the work to hang onto as a big enough client will sometimes need to license something for a different use and those licensing fees can be helpful. (The example I am thinking of involved a fortune 100 parent company and a marketing team who found it more expedient to license every single second of the raw video rather than to bother taking the time to look through it and buy what they wanted.)
 
we use a qnap 14 bay NAS with 140TB of storage. all of our editing stations are connected to it with fiber optic cables so multiple editors can all use the same source media. We have the NAS back up to the cloud once a week, but you will need a very fast upload speed for that to work
 
I can't recommend Synology enough. I have two 4 bays and one 8 bay NAS. The two 4 bays are mostly for my photo archive, then the 8 bay is for footage - 8x 10TB drives using SHR-2 (Raid 5+1) so I get about 55TB of storage on it with two drives of redundancy. It also has 10Gb Ethernet attached to a switch with my computer also running 10GbE so I can get 400-500Mbps read/write speeds consistently. I've been really impressed with the ease of setup/use, can access directly through my Mac finder locally as well as anywhere I have wifi (slower because of my internet speeds at home but can still download a file in a pinch).

Of course I don't just rely on my NAS for safety, I usually have a working edit drive, a clone of that, and then the third backup is the NAS. Retire the drives per project but if you need to access something down the road you just relink to the footage on the NAS.

Shoot me a message if you want more advice, happy to walk you through some do's and don'ts.
 
You must log in or register to reply here.
Back
Top