How Do You Store Your Movie Masters?

Question

Hi all,
I'm curious, how do you store your Movie Masters? Let's say you filmed an important Family event from a camcorder with a hard drive. You imported the footage into you mac and edited it in iMovie or Final Cut Pro or other app.
Then what?
Do you make a DVD?
Do you save a DVD image file on the computer?
Do you export a .mov or other format file?
Do you delete the DV original files because they are so massive?
Do you save/delete the iMovie or FCP master original footage?
When do you delete the camcorder hard drive original (when you need the space)?
What other approaches do you do?
Which is the Master?
How do you back up your movie?
Thanks in advance for your opinions.

Answer 1

Great question. I think the issue of backup is a important one, and one I always worry about since I have a lot of video footage that is irreplaceable.
For back-up, it is helpful to define the risk you are trying to protect from.
For example,
1) risk of corruption in iMovie --> I might use Time Machine (but I do not because I have not had the issue)
2) risk of hard drive failure --> I use SuperDuper! nightly
3) Risk of theft or fire --> offsite backup
Here is what I do...
1) I back up my boot disk with SuperDuper automatically to alternate external partitions every other night so I always have two bootable systems. One is less than one day old, and one is less than two days old.
2) I back up my original video files. For my Motion JPEG, VHS-->AIC, DV, and 8MM to DV, the EVENT is the copy I back up. For my AVCHD high def video, I back up the archive of the AVCHD, but I am not currently backing up the Event files, because I would need from 4 to 8 TB to back up these events depending on whether I made one copy or two.
3) I use CrashPlan for my offsite backup. It costs less than $4 per month, and I seeded the initial backup to an external drive to minimize having to transfer video files over the Internet. I currently have 1.2TB of data backed up to CrashPlan, which includes my entire boot drive, and the files described in #2.
4) All of the above is automated, so I don't have to think about it too much. If I have to manually do stuff, I tend to get behind.
You have to consider the value of total multiple redundancy vs. the likelihood that 2 or three unlikely events would all happen at once. For example, CrashPlan could lose my data. My hard disk could fail. I could lose everything in a fire. But it is unlikely that they would all happen at once, except in nuclear war, in which case, who cares?
I am considering adding Time Machine backup and some off-site backup of the Event files into the mix, but for now I am satisfied.