The factory shots from 2022
A client emails: for a new campaign, they want to reuse the aerial shots of their old factory from a film you made a few years ago, before it was demolished. The producer who ran that job has left. The archive is a shelf of hard drives labelled with client names and years, and some LTO tapes in a box.
An editor plugs in three drives, finds the project, opens the edit, and discovers the drone footage was on a separate drive the drone operator supplied. That drive is not on the shelf. After a day of searching, it turns up labelled with the drone operator's name, not the client's.
Why archives are so hard to search
- Drives are labelled by client and year, not by what is on them.
- Footage from freelancers, drone operators and second units is stored separately.
- Nobody catalogues clips when a project is archived, because everyone is on the next job.
- The people who remember the shoot leave or forget.
- Old drives may not spin up after years on a shelf, and nobody finds out until they are needed.
What an unsearchable archive costs
A request for old footage can take days of editor time, which is hard to charge for. Some requests are refused because the footage cannot be found, which disappoints a client and loses work. Footage that could be licensed or reused sits unused. And the risk of a drive failing without anyone knowing grows every year.
How we build the footage catalogue
- When a project is archived, every clip is listed in the catalogue with project, client, job number, shoot date, camera, duration and where the archive copy lives: drive, tape or cloud path.
- A thumbnail strip is taken from each clip, so it can be recognised at a glance.
- Camera metadata such as date, time and GPS, where recorded, is read automatically.
- An image and speech model, such as those from OpenAI, Anthropic or Google, can suggest shot descriptions and tags, such as aerial, factory, interview, crowd, for a person to check.
- Speech in interview clips can be transcribed, so spoken words are searchable.
- Search works across projects: type factory aerial and see matching clips with thumbnails and the drive or path they live on.
- Old drives can be catalogued in batches when they are plugged in, and the catalogue records the drive's health so failing ones are flagged for copying.
| Catalogue field | Filled by |
|---|---|
| Project, client, job number | Archive step, from your job system |
| Date, time, camera, GPS | Clip metadata |
| Thumbnails | Automatic |
| Shot description and tags | Model suggestion, checked by a person |
| Spoken words | Transcription |
| Archive location | Archive step |
The next old-footage request
A client asks for the interview with their founder from years ago. An assistant editor searches the catalogue for the founder's name. The transcript finds the clip, the thumbnail confirms it, and the catalogue says it is on archive drive 14 and in cloud cold storage. She restores the clip and sends it the same day.
Some requests are for things the company did not keep, and the catalogue makes that clear too. A quick answer that the footage is not in the archive is far better for the client relationship than a week of searching that ends in the same place.
Over time, the older drives are catalogued in quiet weeks. A few are found to be failing and copied before they die, which nobody would have known about otherwise.
Recognise your archive?
- Archive drives are labelled by client and year only.
- Finding old footage takes days.
- Freelancers' footage is on separate drives nobody tracks.
- You have turned down a request because the footage could not be found.
- Nobody knows if old drives still work.