Granted, I deal with more international clients than US clients so, in some ways, there is a greater chance for accidents to happen. Most times these clients come in for a week and we will shoot three or four different stories. At the end of the week all of the video is transfered to their hard drive to take back with them to produce their stories.
In this case, the tv news magazine producer gave her hard drive, with all the material we shot, to an editor and…not sure how…he reformatted the drive and they lost all of the video. Four of the five stories we shot had already been edited and aired. The final one was planned for this week.
I’m a little anal about making sure video doesn’t get lost. I back up all material on two separate external drives after each shoot.
Got a frantic call from the producer yesterday explaining her situation and hoping I still had the material from that final shoot.
In the end…I was their hero for still having the video more than a month after the shoot. Copied the video to another hard drive, then a quick trip to DHL to ship it off to Colombia and a grateful producer.
It got me an additional half-day of pay for my effort and they covered the cost of hard drive and shipping.
This kind of accident does not happen often…only the second time I’ve had a client have this happen after a job…but I wondered how long others kept client material after the shoot and the check has cleared?