Pro Tools sessions long term archiving

[dsavi]

Which is the most secure and economical way of long term archiving Pro Tools sessions? Please share your experience....

[TrentWilliams]

Consolidate all regions with fades (remember that a region/clip with fades on both ends is actually rendered as three seperate files)

- Save Copy In - Select Audio Files (This will get rid of any excess that make your file heavy)

- Close/Open Saved Session

- Open Clip List

- Select All

- Compact (This will trim the handles of all your region/clips to a specified length, I just usually leave it at a default of 1000ms)

Now you have a session which should be a lot smaller and easier to move around.

You can go two ways (or you may have another preference): Zip and Lock, or just move to an archive drive.

The Zip and Lock: Zip the session, this will make it even smaller. Then using some software like Encrypto you can password protect that Zip file. (Keep in mind that you'll have to unlock and uncompress the zip file which takes time, only use this option if you know that job is done).

Archive Drive: Keep the session folder as is and move it to an archive drive.

Naming convention - Think about a convention you'll stick to in order to make things easier to find. I like to use the clients last name as my exclaimer, for instance:

JOHN_dxEDIT_moviename_ARCHIVE_25.05.17

Where John is the client, edit is the type of session, and then an exclaim that it is archived so I know that I have conformed it to my format. Then dx means dialog, and movie name is self explanatory. I keep these two lower case to have two types of 'read through', where I can just read the lower case and see that it's dialog for this movie etc..

But find something that works for you, the above is just a quick example.

Paul Maunder does a good video about archiving too. I'll find the link and post it.

Good luck

[albee1952]

Hard drive and CD-R lifespans are coming up short of what we used to be told. Your best long-term archival is probably going to be M-Disc(many current DVD burners are also M-Disc compatible)

[Ben Jenssen]

Originally Posted by albee1952

Hard drive and CD-R lifespans are coming up short of what we used to be told. Your best long-term archival is probably going to be M-Disc(many current DVD burners are also M-Disc compatible)

M-DISC - Wikipedia