Keeping original footage on cassets - not re-shooting over old footage

Question

Is it standard procedure to retain all cassettes with the original footage rather than re-shoot over old footage? This way, no matter how you botch up footage or if it gets lost during an importing procedure, you always have your originals. True, you have to re-do them, but they are always there in a box, safe!
Am I wrong? Is the only argument the (valid) one about saving money?
— Lorna in Southern California
17" flatscreen iMac, 1 GHz Power PC G4, 768 MB DDR SDRAM   Mac OS X (10.3.9)   LaCie external hard drive, 111 Gigabytes

Answer 1

Exporting the iMovie project back to tape can be
useful too. (I keep the original tape, plus an iMovie
export tape.)
The export tape has two advantages over the
original:
1. It doesn't include all the junk discarded from the
source video. Shots of the floor, poorly exposed
shots, etc. have all been removed.
2. It's a project backup. When exporting the project,
iMovie exports the clips as clips, so when you
re-import that tape, the video comes back as clips.
That can be very useful. If you ever wish to edit the
project again or edit it with a new version of
iMovie, the clips are all there. Clips like titles
can't be edited, of course, but they can be replaced
with clips re-imported from the original tape.
Adjacent clips edited by iMovie lose their time code,
so they are joined together, but most clips retain
their clip-ness.
3. Actually, there's a third advantage: it provides
another backup so if the original tape goes bad, you
still have a tape. It doesn't hurt to store the two
tapes in different locations.
Karl
Karl, this is excellent advice! I will do it! I will keep both the original raw footage and the finished product. Keeping the raw footage has all the original junk in it, but you never know when that one thing that you edited out might be something useful, for whatever unthought-of reason.
I like the ideas that come from this forum!
-Lorna