How to prevent future problems
Going through a movie repair is expensive, time-consuming, and sometimes the damaged footage cannot be recovered at all.
Since 2007 we have been dealing with corrupt movie files and there is a clear pattern of dangerous situations and behaviors. By observing the few rules below, the chances of failure are cut by an order of magnitude:
- Work safely: carefully prepare your set-up, making sure the cables cannot be disconnected accidentally, fragile hard disks, cameras and computers will not fall or be kicked.
- Monitor available recording time, disk space, battery level
- Avoid live camera to computer recording. Computers are complex systems that crash often.
- Keep your master files religiously. At least until the final product is done, delivered, accepted, paid ...
- Do back-ups of your disks AND verify that you can really retrieve your data from your back-ups, every week.
- Use redundant storage whenever possible, for example RAID disks (WARNING: RAID0 is not a redundant disk!)
This is indeed what every video professional should already be doing.
See also related blog post: Advice to prevent movie corruption
