I’ve always wondered this, because any answer seems insane to me.
After a long day of filming a movie, where is the footage stored? Is it just on some computer? And then when everything has been filmed, edited, etc. is the whole finished movie just on some single hard drive?? I’m sure they have it in multiple places, but it seems crazy that all of the footage of a marvel movie or something similar has to be saved somewhere so simple. In short, I guess I’m asking where movies exist in their final form before they’re available to the public.
And as a secondary question, how is the finished film distributed? How does it go from being a finished project to being in movie theaters? Does the theater receive some sort of electronic “file” that then is stored on a computer system within the theater? It seems like the process would have to be more complex than a fancy email, but I have no idea.
In: Technology
Source: I used to do this for a living.
For the sake of keeping this simple, let’s leave actual film out of this and just discuss digital cameras like the Alexa or RED.
The cameras shoot onto solid state hard drives, they take different form factors but they’re all the same. The camera only records to one card at a time so when the card is full it gets handed off to the Digital Utility/Loader/DIT. This person has a screaming fast computer connected to a raid array and a shuttle drive. All footage from the day is transferred to both drives simultaneously off of the drive that came from the camera. At this point there are three redundant copies of the data. Footage is reviewed and checksums run to make sure the data transferred correctly. At the end of the day all the drives from the camera are stored in a pelican case on the data cart. The Raid Drive is usually stored there too but on some productions goes to the production office. The shuttle drive goes to the post-production facility (this part is twice/day, once at lunch, once at wrap)
Triple redundancy for day 1.
The next day, an email confirmation comes from post production that they have transferred and checked the files from the previous day. They are stored in at least two places in post-production. Usually in two locations. They wipe the shuttle drive that sent the files over and send it back to set.
At this point the previous day’s camera drives can be wiped for reuse. The Data will still be kept on the raid for 5 days so there is a failsafe.
The only time the footage is ever only stored in a single place is when it is sitting on the loader’s desk waiting to be transferred. That would be a bad time to spill coffee….
Film on the other-hand was always a single point of failure. At the end of the night, the collective work of every member of the film crew is sitting in a box in the darkroom. On a union production they get handed to a teamster and driven the lab in a van to be developed and processed. On a lower-budget shoot it’s usually handed to the lowest paid Production Assistant to be driven to the lab in their personal car… How’s that for a single point of failure…
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