We recently ran our smartphone video training course for a PR agency, who plan to use their skills to create content for clients.
One issue which cropped up was how to store the huge quantities of rushes they were likely to film. Here, our Smart Video expert, Paul Curran, gives his top tips:
Content is king these days and if you are producing good video content – either in-house or for clients – it is important to manage and looked after it.
It is worth developing a code of best practice to ensure your valuable resources aren’t squandered.
I’d suggest the following ways to look after your video content:
1. Anyone returning from filming should upload their rushes to the cloud and onto a suitable hard drive.
2. Each set of rushes should be clearly labelled. Eg: Rough House-Media-Training-April2017
3. A separate note should be kept of what was filmed. Eg: Interviews with founders, testimonials from client, GVs (general views) of training course
4. Anyone editing with the rushes should use a fast hard drive rather than their own laptops. We recommend Lacie Rugged drives which are relatively cheap and fast enough but importantly rugged!
5. Editing with rushes on a laptop is fine but on a complicated edit will be very slow – also laptops have a habit of breaking. All professional editors edit from an external hard drive or storage system.
6. Final films should be uploaded to the cloud and copied to the external hard drive. This might seem rather belt and braces, as you can quite happily do everything on a laptop and you’ll probably be fine. However, you’ll be kicking yourselves if someone loses or breaks that laptop and you have no back up of your valuable video content.
There is extra value in saving all your rushes together: if all your video content is saved in the cloud or on a hard drive, it makes it easy to put together a showreel of your work. This is especially useful if you’re a PR or marketing agency, and are pitching to retain a new client.
As well as producing videos for our clients, we run Smart Video courses to train people how to make films using just a smartphone and a laptop. We can do this in-house, and we are also running an open course on 23 May in London. Each place is £250 + VAT. For more details, contact us on 020 8332 6200 or info@roughhouse.co.uk.
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