Apple Final Cut Pro 7 - Manual (Page 1503)

Archiving Completed Projects
After living and breathing a project for months or years, it may be hard to imagine you’ll
ever want to look at it or touch it again—but you never know for sure. You might get a
surprise distribution offer, but with the caveat that you shorten the project by 5 minutes.
If that happens, will you be able to resurrect the project from its individual media and
sequence components? Did you save everything you needed?
When you archive your project, you need to ask yourself, “How long will I need this
project?” This is a hard question to answer with certainty, so most people err on the side
of caution. It’s almost always better to back up more than less.
For long-term archiving, you should save both the project file and the original media
(such as the actual videotapes). As long as there is an accurate timecode relationship
between the clips in your project and the timecode on your videotapes (or film), you can
open your project and recapture your media at any time.
Depending on the duration of your original footage, the captured media files that you
used for your project are not necessarily worth archiving long-term, simply because they
are extraneous copies of your original videotapes. Also, backing up to inexpensive formats,
such as DVD-R, can be fairly time consuming. As long as you archive your project file and
you have the original videotapes available to recapture clips from, your project is
sufficiently archived.
• Project files: These are typically quite small, and many versions of a project file can be
archived on a DVD disc, CD-ROM disc, or similar storage media.
• Media files captured from tape or other timecoded sources: These files require a lot of disk
space, so it can be impractical to back them up. As long as your tapes have timecode,
you can simply store the original tapes along with the backed-up project file. If you
need to revisit your project later, you can use the timecode information in the clips of
your project file to recapture media from tape.
• Media files without timecode and files created on a computer: Graphics files, such as still
images, and motion graphics that originated on a computer should be permanently
archived on a hard disk, DVD-ROM, or similar storage media. You should also save the
original project files from the applications that you used to create these media files.
For example, if you created a motion graphics logo in Motion, you should back up the
Motion project file, as well as any non-timecoded media files associated with that
project. Non-timecoded video sources, such as video from VHS tape or audio from an
audio CD, should also be backed up, because you can’t accurately recapture this media
later.
1503 Chapter 88 Backing Up and Restoring Projects