
Video Backup & Archiving
WHEN YOU BOOK SUMMERFIELD FILMS AS YOUR WEDDING VIDEOGRAPHERS, YOU’RE PROBABLY FOCUSED ON US DOING TWO KEY THINGS: FILMING YOUR WEDDING DAY, AND DELIVERING YOUR BEAUTIFUL WEDDING FILMS.
However, there's a behind-the-scenes part of our workflow you may be interested in knowing about, which deals with the safety and security of your wedding video footage now and in the future. As professionals, we take this very seriously and go to great effort and expense to ensure your wedding footage is protected.
Step 1: Two is better than one
Every time we start and stop our video cameras on your wedding day, we create a digital video file. These video files are stored on digital media cards in our cameras. After your wedding day (Yay!), the first thing we do is “ingest” or transfer these video files (your wedding footage) from our camera into our editing workstation. At this point it’s on our hard drives ready for editing. We start protecting your footage immediately during this step by having two hard drives in the workstation devoted to one task – storage of your footage. Every day at a preassigned time, our workstation automatically compares the contents of both drives and all new data is copied between the two. As a result, both drives are in essence cloned every day, holding identical information. If we didn’t take this step and were to store your footage on only one data drive and it failed, well we don’t even want to think about that! Storing your video footage on two hard drives from the very beginning provides fail-safe redundancy just in case. But we don’t stop there…
Step 2: Cloud backup
As soon as we transfer your wedding video files into our video workstation, we immediately upload all of your raw footage to the cloud. Cloud is a term that is widely used in today’s world but little understood by most people. The cloud is simply a term used to describe computing and storage networks based on remote servers. So when we upload to the cloud, we’re uploading to the servers of dependable companies like Google, Microsoft and Apple. These cloud storage companies don’t store data on just one server. To protect your valuable video data, they copy it to many servers in different locations around North America and the world. Uploading and storing all your raw data to the cloud as another layer of redundancy and protection, means that even if some catastrophic event like fire, flood, theft, etc. were to happen to our studio and computers, your raw footage is safe in cloud storage.
Step 3: Your wedding films are safe too
We follow the same sound practices with your edited wedding films as we do with your raw wedding footage. Once your wedding videos are finished and delivered to you, we backup all the editing files and final films to external hard drives which are then archived. In addition, we upload everything to cloud storage to join your raw footage for archiving. As a result, all files and data related to your wedding videography & wedding films are safe and sound for years to come. Down the road if you somehow lose your wedding videos or raw footage, we’ve got you covered!
As professional wedding videographers, we want you to rest assured that we’re working hard to secure and protect your beloved wedding day memories!