Loss or corruption of footage. It is the nightmare of any wedding filmmaker. It literally keeps us awake at night and has us break out in cold sweats.
A couple have planned a wedding for years. They’ve entrusted us to capture the most important moments of the most important day in their lives together. Until we get back from the wedding, this exists on little SD cards, vulnerable to the perils of the world.
The thought that none of us can stomach without feeling nauseous – WHAT IF THE FOOTAGE WAS LOST OR CORRUPTED???!!!!
We’d rapidly go into hiding in Rio de Janeiro, that’s what. However, to avoid this awful scenario ever arising, we take several steps.
- We shoot with multiple cameras for the key elements, which automatically acts as a safeguard.
- When shooting the wedding, we use smaller cards (16-32GB) and swap them regularly. That minimises any data loss due to an individual card being corrupted.
- Cards are kept in waterproof, shatterproof cases which are kept on our person, at all times. If you see me tapping my jacket pocket, it’ll be to reassure myself that the case is still there, despite the fact its often tied on.
- As soon as the wedding is finished, I copy all cards onto a new folder on a laptop that goes with me. Now the footage is in two locations.
- I then copy the folder on the laptop onto an external hard drive. It is now in three locations.
- Now, having just purchased a dedicated RAID drive for the office, I will copy the folder into the RAID drive, which has two 4TB drives running in tandem, one of which mirrors the other. So now, for a while anyway, the footage is in five locations. Then the individual SD cards can be formatted for use in the next wedding. The beauty of this RAID set up is that if one is corrupted, the footage is still there on the other. Plus, the drives can pop out and be carried with me. Or, as time goes on, I can simply insert larger capacity drives to store more footage.
- The external hard drive stays at my house, while the RAID server is in the office. That means we’ve got a safeguard against fire damage or theft as well.
And only after all that is done, do we begin to feel even remotely at ease about the security of data. This is just one of many things that we, and any wedding videographer worth their salt, will do behind the scenes to ensure that the trust you place in us isn’t abused.
If you’d like to discuss your wedding day with us, drop us a line today
