Video Archive

What is a video archive?

A video archive is an organized store of finished projects, masters and selected source material, kept for rare future access rather than active editing or delivery. It is where a project goes once the client has signed off and collected their files. A good archive is not just a pile of old drives: it is labeled, searchable and recoverable.

Why it matters

Finished work keeps having value long after delivery. A couple asks for their wedding film again after a lost laptop. An agency wants a new cut-down from a campaign shot two years ago. A past project becomes the best clip in your showreel. If the files are scattered across editing drives and download folders, each of these requests turns into hours of searching, or a polite apology.

Archiving also keeps working storage lean. Fast SSDs and live cloud storage are expensive per terabyte, and they slow down when they are full of last year's jobs. Moving completed projects out deliberately means your active tools only hold what you are working on now.

How it works

Archiving is a decision about what to keep, followed by a consistent process for storing it. A typical archive package for one project includes:

• The master files that were delivered, such as a ProRes or high-bitrate H.264 export of every final version.

• The project file from the edit, plus any color, audio and graphics sessions.

• Source footage, either in full or trimmed to used clips with handles, depending on the client and the contract.

• Assets such as music licenses, fonts, logos and release forms.

• A short readme noting the client, date, software versions and where everything lives.

Many filmmakers consolidate or "media manage" the project in their editing software before archiving, so the project file points to a single self-contained folder. A consistent naming convention, like `2025-06_ClientName_ProjectName`, makes the archive searchable years later without special software.

The storage itself can be hard drives on a shelf, LTO tape, a NAS, or a cold cloud tier. Archived data is rarely touched, so cheaper and slower media is usually acceptable, as long as you can still restore it when needed.

Archive vs backup vs active storage

These three terms are often mixed up. Active storage holds projects you are working on or delivering right now. A backup is an extra copy that protects against loss, and it exists for both active and archived work. An archive is the long-term home of finished projects. The key point: an archive is not a backup by itself. If your only copy of a finished project sits on one archive drive, it is one failure away from gone. Most professionals keep at least two copies of archived work in different places.

Some people use Dropbox or Google Drive folders as an informal archive, which works for small volumes but can get costly as terabytes accumulate. Others rely on physical drives, which are cheap but need periodic checking.

How does DLVRD fit into a video archive?

DLVRD is built for delivering finished work to clients, not as a replacement for your own archive and backups. It stores your original uploads untouched and returns them exactly as uploaded when a client downloads, and you keep full ownership of your files. Galleries stay live unless you set an expiry date, so you decide how long a delivery stays available before the project moves to your archive.