When The Storyhive started five years ago, we were travelling the world, filming whenever and whatever our clients required. And we were producing LOTS AND LOTS OF HONEY… By “honey” we mean high-resolution video footage. We had to figure out the best way to store and preserve all that beautiful, golden, delicious honey… well video... ya know.
Let’s hit the rewind button...
"Back in the day” video was acquired on tapes. Videomakers employed the use of a wide variety of cameras that recorded to various tape formats.
You might remember VHS and Betamax from the 1980’s, but video professionals in the late 1990’s and early 2000’s were using DVCPro, MiniDV or HDV. All of these are tape-based formats.
These tapes could be bulky and the more you shot, the more physical space you needed to store them. Sometimes entire rooms at news stations and production companies were dedicated to tape archives and backups.
Hello, digital!
As technology advanced, the analog-capture-to-tape method withered away. That’s when digital-solid-state-video-capture hit the market. Cameras started recording digital video on small cards. This made for faster and easier transfer to editing systems, as well as a more reliable way to organize and archive video footage.
Let’s just say all of the Hivesters are happy the days of tape are gone.
How much footage do we have and what do we do with it?
All in all we have accumulated around 340 Terabytes of video footage. To put that into perspective, that would be like hanging on to about 12,580,000,000 single page word documents. Yes... BILLION!!!
To keep track of all this “honey,” we have a detailed process of ingesting the footage after shoots, then logging and organizing it throughout the editing process, multiple layers of backups and redundancies, and finally archiving ALL raw footage and finished videos.
Why do we store and maintain this footage? Customer Service… plain and simple. We are dedicated to cultivating long-lasting relationships with our clients. Archiving footage is a process. It takes time, organization, and money. We run our server in a secure, climate controlled environment that is monitored remotely 24/7/365.
That includes routine updates, maintenance and health checks to the mass storage device. Shout out to our friends at eNetSystems and ProMax for their outstanding technical support and server solutions.
So, even though digital video acquisition has made our lives in the “video world” much easier… it is still a very detailed and “hands-on” process to keep your “honey” safe.
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