What files do people delete at the end of a project?

[Alan Mills]

This is a question that has been at the back of my mind since I picked up this hobby (at Xmas).

I could break the tasks for producing a home-grown DVD into the following steps for convenience...

1 Capture video (analogue or digital, makes no odds for this discussion.
2 Edit video
3 Produce/master a DVD image

As we all know (by now) this can take up a lot of hard disk space so what i was wondering is, what do people actually delete when they have their completed project?

Removing the captured clips, editting projects and DVD projects can be done but being left with ony the master DVD does not lend itself very well to any re-editting later on (director's cut????).

Perhaps the problem for me (as a software developer) is that deleting any of these intermediate steps just goes against the grain. It's like deleting my source files for a computer program/system I'm working on. It might be ok now but how can i then make refinements (or fix bugs!)

At the moment, I am certainly keeping my ulitimate source, the Mini-DV tapes, so with some hard work I could reproduce the project.

What does everyone else do regarding this? Do you archive off all stages (to more DVD-Rs?) preserving the full set of files for each stage of the development process or what? Not sure this is cost effective, given the size of the AVI files I'm producing from video captures.

Just wondering what level of information people here decide to actually keep.

Alan

[tongachutt]

Hi millsy

Two ways i have used are..

If you use premier you could use the project trimmer to rid yourself of all but the used (in the timeline) captured footage. You could archive this and re-capture at a later date any footage you need for the "directors cut."

Alternately you could batch capture the footage originally and save the capture log as part of the project - then you can delete all teh captured footage (when you've finished!). Its a simple matter to then recapture all the footage if needed at a later time.

As long as I've a copy of the project in its current state as well as a capture log archived I can always rebuild it relatively painlessly even if the cat p*sses on the 'puter.

Cheers

tonga