7 Steps to Ensure the Safety of Your Video Content

It is an irrefutable truth that your media matters. It matters to you and your organisation today and it will matter tomorrow and long into the future. It is therefore important that we explain to you the steps that we at Clean Cut Media adhere to for all our clients and their media, without fail. Whether you select us as your video production company or not, we hope that information about our workflow will service you well into the future.

We hate to be the harbinger of bad news, but if media isn’t managed properly, it does get lost and damaged. The considerable effort, time and resource that has gone into producing the media won’t matter a jot. It is critical to the success of your corporate video project that your corporate video company invests soundly in the people, the technology and the methodology behind media security.

7 Steps

1. Confirm that your corporate production company employs a Media Manager. You may never meet them but they are your ally. They will have a firm handle on the location, filing, logging and the security of your precious footage. Think of them as the gatekeeper!  By the way, by ‘footage’ we are not just talking about the final version of the of your video but everything that was filmed.
2. Throughout the shoot, the crew will be swapping cards with the camera operatives and backing up the raw footage (the ‘rushes’) to two hard drives to reduce the chances of footage corrupting.
3. Almost immediately after the shoot has finished the team works towards getting every shot back to the Media Manager in the office who  can transfer all footage to the Dynamic Drive Pool server (DDP), where it is both secure and safe. Within two hours of being back at the office, the footage is now on two drives and on our DDP where producers and editors can view it from a range of sources.
4. The Media Manager sets to work archiving this content. Correct labelling, naming and logging is adhered to from the start.
5. Within the same time frame, the footage is now being backed unto our state of the art Quantum LTO 7 or m-Tape LTO 6 machine. Incredibly, these machines can back up up to 6 terabytes of data per tape. This deep storage archival process is all verified through the deepest verification algorithm called Checksum to ensure every file is the exact same that came from the camera, using pre-roll post. This software is ‘video aware’ so you can count on pre-roll post production to get everything right the first time. There’s even a function that analyses every tape before archiving to ensure its capability and lifespan. It also has indexing, proxy and metadata capabilities which allow us to search through each LTO tape without the tape being mounted (plugged in).
6. Archiving footage on hard drives is a thing of the past. Did  you know that the average lifespan of a hard drive is 2-5 years and run the risk of becoming corrupt? With LTO you can ensure up to 30 years of safe storage.
7. By the time the edit has finished, all the rushes will have been backed up to two LTO’s, stored in two different places to ensure safety against fire and theft.

Media management is a painstakingly meticulous undertaking. Please ensure it is high on your list of requirements when choosing your video production company.

We wish you every success with your project. If you would like to talk to us about the security of your project please get in touch.