Archive a production

What this is about

The reuse request always arrives, usually a year later and usually urgent: we need thirty seconds from that factory shoot. What decides whether that takes twenty minutes or two days is not how much was stored but how it was structured. An archive that works has a predictable folder layout, filenames that describe content, a copy of the finished masters, the project file with its media, and the paperwork — licences, releases, the approved script. What it deliberately does not have is every rejected take of every setup, kept out of guilt rather than purpose.

The order matters more than the tools. Skip a step and you usually notice two steps later — by which point the fix costs several times as much.

What runs differently here

In planning terms, that means:

• Follow the three-two-one principle: three copies, two different media, one of them off-site
• Selects and camera originals of used material are worth keeping; forty failed takes of the same line are not
• Store the licences, model releases and location permissions with the footage, not in a mailbox
• Personal data has a retention limit — know when faces and names have to be deleted and note the date in the archive
• Test one restore per year; an untested backup is a belief, not a backup

Step by step

This order gets you there fastest:

1. Decide the archive scope while the project is still open, not months later. What gets kept is a project decision with a cost, and it is far cheaper to make it once.
2. Build a consistent folder structure per production: originals, audio, graphics, project files, masters, deliverables, documents. Same names, same order, every job, forever.
3. Consolidate the edit project so every used media file sits inside the project folder. A project that references media on someone's desktop will not open on any other machine.
4. Export the masters and the textless versions into the archive as files, not as a link to a cloud folder that a subscription will eventually stop paying for.
5. Collect the paperwork into one documents folder: music licences, model releases, location permissions, the approved script and the final approval mail with its version number.
6. Write a short read-me at the top level: what the production was, when it was shot, who was involved, what is in each folder and which file is the final master.
7. Apply the three-two-one rule and record where the copies are. An archive whose second copy is a drive nobody can locate has one copy and an optimistic label.
8. Set a review date. Storage costs money and personal data has legal limits, so decide in advance when this archive gets thinned, migrated to new media, or deleted.

Common pitfalls

What most often goes wrong in practice:

• Archiving everything because deciding felt harder than buying another drive
• Keeping the project file without consolidating the media it points at
• Storing licences and releases in an inbox that leaves with the employee who received them
• Discovering the backup drive was unreadable at the exact moment it was needed

With TillyGen

Shot lists, call sheets, the schedule and the participant list from TillyGen belong in the archive as documents — they explain a year later what was shot where, with whom, and under which permission.

Change one constraint and the consequences travel through the whole plan: affected shots are flagged, the call sheet is regenerated, and nobody keeps working from yesterday's version.