Ingesting Material
WIP
Transferring material
Once the media has been captured, it must be backed up safely and trustworthy.
Data handling
It's very important to always have at least two copies of your material. Ideally, you should follow the 3:2:1 rule that says the following:
- 3 copies of the data
- On 2 different media (e.g one being an SSD, the other a server)
- 1 being off-site (another location than the 2 other copies)
It's very important that the media captured doesn't change the filename at any moment of production. This can lead to media not linking up correctly when moving the project between software.
Transferring the material
When transferring the material from the SD cards to your hard disks, you want to make sure that you can trust the transfer you are doing. A transfer using the operating system's built-in drag-and-drop or copy-and-paste utility. If the connection to the SD card or disk is lost for a short moment, it's quite possible that a part of a file that was being transferred at that moment would be corrupted.
The solution to this problem is to use a file transfer program that used checksum verification. You can imagine a checksum as a unique fingerprint for a file. If the file at the destination has a different fingerprint than the one at the source media, then it is a red flag and we'll know that the file didn't transfer correctly. Even if the filename of the file has changed, the fingerprint of the file won't be the same anymore. There is two great free software for transferring files safely with checksum verification, that I would recommend.
TeraCopy
TeraCopy is a free program for file transferring, that supports file verification. It usually also copies files faster than a regular file transfer. It can be downloaded here for both Windows and MacOS.
DaVinci Resolve's Clone Tool
Another great option is DaVinci Resolve. If you don't already have it installed you can get it here for Windows, MacOS, and Linux.
On the Media Page, there's a great tool for copying material from cards to your disks. A nice feature of this tool is that it can copy to two destinations at the same time without reading from the card another time for each destination you are transferring to. However, if you are using a hard disk together with a fast SSD it might be a good idea to split the transfer up, as it will be the slowest drive that determines the transfer speed.