What is the BEST WAY TO ARCHIVE OLD PROJECTS and related media?

Question

Hi,
I've been running a Wedding Film-making business for the last 12 months full-time. In that time I've acquired about 4TB of Hard Drive space, but as I get more work coming in the door I'm starting to need to get rid of old Weddings and Corporates I've shot.
In the past - ie. at my old employers - I've archived the tapes in a storage room, and deleted all the captured footage. Then I'd burn the project file to a DVD or BLU-RAY depending on the job.
Now that everything is Digital, is there a good way to archive the footage without buying a million TB's of Hard Drive space (then considering keeping multiple copies for safety)???
I'm not concerned about needing to return to make changes to the projects at a later stage - these Weddings are locked and will never be changed.
Any help, suggestions, or an example of what you do would be greatly appreciated!
Thanks,
Thomas

Answer 1

Well that depends, if you only keep the exported copy and not the raw footage then if someone request some sort of edit change you'd be screwed if you didn't keep all the raw footage and simply kept the exported copy. However if you know that they aren't going to request some sort of change or you let them know up front they won't be able to make anymore changes after a certian point.(For exampel after you give the finished product and it's been approved by them) you can save TONS of space by simply only archiving the exported copy for them incase they need to make them another copy for some reason.
Where I work we always backup EVERYTHING, because we have had clients call back and request raw footage (meaning un-edited footage) almost 2 years after they filmed before. So if  this happens to you will probably be happy you didn't keep only a exported edited copy and that you held on to all your source media. So really unless you're just 100 percent positive that this won't ever happen or it just hasn't happened to you as of yet then you can just export the project from premiere and keep only that.
Blu-rays are a good backup option overall and like you mentioned for the amount of space you're currently using it won't be very expensive to just use hard disk. Just remember that you'll need to hook the HD's up at least 1 time per month. The reason is that it's good for them to spin every once in awhile. However in all honesty if you go with a RAID 1 setup or just simply buy two disk you won't run into to many occaisions where both disk fail at once... It hasn't ever happned to me at my job or in my personal business.
One option though that in some ways would give you the best of both worlds would be to use the project mananger feature in Premiere to save everything that is in your timeline to a project folder. (It basically saves all your footage that's in your time-line. It excludes un-used things from the bin unelss you say different) Anyways it will save you space in the end while still saving the entire project to a single folder of your chosing. Then you could export your finished program from Premiere and then burn your disc from the finished file you got and only backup your finished file to say a blu-ray disc and then backup your finished file and your saved project to your hard disc you have to archive stuff on. What used to be 150GB would now probably only be like 25-40GB max. But like I said if someone requested a major change and not something minor you'd be out in the cold... I don't use encore much though so someone else would have to answer your question about backing up a encore project... But I'd assume if you had the backed up premiere exported digital file you could just import it into encore and be ready to roll so you wouldn't really need to backup the encore project unless you make a crazy cool customized menu or something. Then if someone needed only a minor change such as graphics or something you could use your backed up project folder from premiere to make the change and then send it to encore to re-export the product with the requested minor changes.
It all really comes down to what you want to do. I'd recommend at the very least you backup your premiere project the way I described and also save the exported copy of your final project.