How I Protect Your Digital Memories.
This is a boring topic, but probably the most important.
Hiring a professional wedding videographer isn’t just about how they blend in on the day, or their creative vision and style.
When hiring your wedding videographer you should be asking what their workflow is for ensuring the protection of your wedding files.
Weddings are extremely stressful and fast-moving, there is a lot that goes on in the background that both couples and wedding guests will have no idea about, which means all wedding suppliers are doing their job correctly. However, it’s important during these stressful times videographers have data protection in mind.
Here at Castle Gate Films, our approach to data protection is as follows, we would expect all wedding videographers to follow. If your wedding videographer doesn’t follow these steps this should be a red flag.
On The Wedding Day
Every camera that comes onto a shoot has a dual recording function. This means that when a camera is filming it’s actually going straight to two cards at the same time. This will provide some redundancy in the event that a card suffers a corruption.
Even though we usually film using two cameras we always have 3-4 cameras with us in the event that a camera malfunctions.
We use a large capacity branded cards for all of our cameras, these cards are expensive but are very reliable.
We only use original branded batteries as these are proven to be the most reliable. Again, these are very expensive but are proven to be more reliable. Cheaper versions of these batteries have been known to fail during filming which can cause corruptions to both data cards.
Because wedding days are so stressful and fast-moving, we never copy data from cards during the day. This is where most videographers fall victim of formatting wrong cards or pulling cards out when the camera is still on, there is just so much that can go wrong. Our approach is to leave the cards alone in their cameras until the event is over and we are back in the office where we can safely transfer the date.
After The Wedding Day
Once we have finished filming the wedding, we head back to the office to start the download of all audio and video files. We do this using software that checks to ensure each file is correct and not showing signs of any corruption.
Once all cameras and voice recorders have been copied to the storage unit we then label each file ready for archive. We always create a mirrored copy of all the RAW files before we start any work on them.
Once all files have been categorised and labelled we copy all the files to two locally stored network-attached storage units, both these units have in-built redundancy to prevent data loss from a single disk failure.
Once all the RAW files have been copied to both local NAS units we then begin our final backup stage of copying all the RAW files to a remote offsite storage facility, which is a third-party supplier and hosts its own redundancy features.
Once the local and remote backups are complete your data is now stored in 4 locations:
On the high-performance machine (with redundancy) that your wedding project will be edited on.
On two local network-attached storage units with in-built redundancy.
Finally, on an external thrid-party cloud provider.
Now we can start to edit your wedding film knowing that all the RAW footage is safe and protected.
