How (and Why) to Save Your Footage

You have already put in the time, effort and money to schedule a professional video shoot. The result is a three-minute video trimmed from all that content. What happens to the rest of the footage? More often than not, it is deleted. Lost. Wiped, after all that time, effort, and money. Unless your contract says differently, the videographer owns the footage and it's locked in their stores and deleted by them whenever they choose. But if you had had access to it, you could use that valuable resource on countless other projects, large and small -- those shots could have been the building blocks of other, much cheaper, marketing projects.

#ProTip: Your footage is a valuable resource. Save it.

Practically speaking, you probably don't have the hard drive space to store that much footage (I'm talking 100GB on most projects), or the software to edit it. Which is why so much valuable footage is lost and never used again. Here at Thing in a Pot, we recognize its value, as well as the inability of our clients to keep it themselves. So every contract comes with our promise to store the footage, free, for at least one year after the shoot. When you would like a new project, we have those assets ready to go. While we do charge for any new editing, the costs are exponentially lower than if you had to reshoot all the footage again. It's the best way to get the most bang for your buck, while saving time and effort. And I call that a win-win.

Katie Rutter is the executive producer of Thing in a Pot Productions. She has received multiple awards for her videos and the overall quality of her work, including being honored as Video Producer of the Year in 2018 by the Catholic Press Association. Subscribe to our newsletter to receive our video ProTips in your inbox every month!