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Filmmakers: when do you delete your files?
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So i have this problem that has been building, I have two 1tb external drives full, one 500mb full, and my computers 500 mb almost full as well of mostly raw video files. For most of them I have already made the edit, and used the best of the shots in my cinematography reel, but I just can't bring myself to delete them. For some reason I feel like there may be a time I will need some random clip in the future and I cant get myself to do away with them. This would not be a problem except for I am not really able to afford any more harddrives at the moment, so therefore I think it must be done.
Basically what I am asking, is do any of you other filmmakers have this problem? and If not then at what point will you finally get rid of files? I feel like a hoarder, except in the digital realm haha.
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I only delete backups, when the clips get old enough and are archived away to a hard drive for storage.
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Yeah thats what I was doing, now I am to the point where I have deleted the backups, but still have one copy archived, and have no memory still. I guess the easy answer is buy more fricken harddrives, but I am not in a steady income at the moment haha.
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It's a bitch and a half. We have cameras now that produce larger and larger file sizes becoming cheaper and cheaper, while storage doesn't.
RAW cameras are even worse. 2hrs of the black magic cinema camera's footage takes up 1tb! Imagine a season filmed on one. Better have a nice raid setup the same price as the camera itself!
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Damn, yeah thats just wild. At least memory seems to be getting cheaper and cheaper.
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you could always just compress it down quite a bit, without noticing a HUGE decrease in file quality if you convert it to h.264 and lower the quality a tiny bit you could get it at least half the size depending on the current format.
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? hard drives are definitely getting cheaper. I'm amazed at how little I can pay for a 2 TB drive now compared to a few years ago
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I think I meant to say, not getting as cheap as quickly, and not getting much larger in capacity while being reliable
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Over here it was the same deal, harddrives were gettin cheaper and cheaper. Then they decided to put a special tax on storage media because of piracy, so now they're expensive again, Sucks.
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I never delete them. It takes a lot of effort to go out and capture video, I see no reason to simply axe them forever.
I'll be going to college next year, and I don't want to bring everything with me. I have a set of matching external hard drives that I will archive the old files onto. Then I will leave one drive at my mom's house, and the other at my dad's.
If I were in your position, I would buy a pair of high capacity (don't worry about speed though) internal drives along with a "toaster" to plug them into your computer. Then I'd toss all my ancient stuff onto each of them and free up space on the drives that you edit from.
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exclosures are better than the toasters. Protects the drives a bit more.
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I only delete when it says my startup disk is almost full haha
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Im soooo god damm bad at organising my media! I should definately start stacking projects. at the moment I only keep completed videos or files for contracts until the possibility of having to re work is gone. its going to bite me in the ass soon I know it!
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Ive been slowly deleting my non-transcoded camera files from the year, but ill always keep every clip I record. Its bad but shit, i cant just delete it ha.
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I just recently deleted all of my files from this season prior to this april. In my opinion, it was a big mistake.
A) I got the urge to make a "favorite shots of winter" about a week after and was SOL on that one.
B) A friend approached me on making a season edit for some compensation from his sponsors. SOL on that one too.
I'm gonna start keeping files much later than intended now, lesson learned I guess.
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I don't delete any. It sucks but Abe said it right; why delete it when you put so much effort into getting it? I use the clusterfuck hard drive technique; I have a 1 TB, 2 TB, and a portable 500 gig. Scattered across those three and my laptop's internal 500 gig drive is all the footage I've shot, pretty much ever.
That Black Magic stat is insane. That's just...wow.
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I'm talking about an archival system. If a drive is gonna sit in a closet for years, an antistatic bag will be just as effective as a plastic enclosure.
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