Back up your project

- [Instructor] So here we are we have finished our sequence, we've shared it with the world and we're ready to archive it and clean up the machine. This is a critical stage because if you want to be able to rebuild the sequence in the future you're going to need to make sure you backup the correct items. It's pretty straightforward to do, first of all we know where our project file is because we just browsed to it, and you're definitely going to want to take a copy. So if I toggle over to the finder here on macOS and of course this would be explorer in Windows here's our project folder and if I expand this we can see the various bins as files.

When I'm working on a large scale project I make intermittent backups of these project folders at key stages in the development of the project. So at the end of the assembly edit in fact at the end of ingesting the media and then the assembly edit, then the roughcut, the first fine cut and so on. So I would take another backup of this folder but in addition to this I would also make a backup of the Attic folder for this project. Just going to toggle over to another finder window I have open here.

This is the Avid Attic where the autosave places copies of your bins in addition to each time you manually save. The file location for macOS and Windows is pretty similar by default, it's in a shared users folder, there's an Avid Media Composer folder there and in there you'll find Avid Attic. If in doubt just do a search on your computer for Avid Attic. We've got quite a few different bins stored in here but the one I'm really interested in is this TN Parkour folder.

This is 29.3 mb in spite of all of the bins that we've created all the way throughout this course for this project. So I would just backup the entire thing but if I browse inside here you can see each of the bin files as they've been stored. Importantly, here's our sequences bin so although it's a folder with the same name it actually represents all of the instances of the sequences bin that we have created. That's a lot of versions of a bin.

Remember you can specify up to a thousand or more in total bin files in the Attic. So its no problem to have a lot of these they're pretty small files. You're also likely to want to backup your media. We'll just close these two, and I suppose it depends if you're working with professional media it's likely that you already have an archived copy just for safety, for security, for insurance purposes. But in any case, if you want to locate your media you can always open up a bin choose a clip or more than one clip right click and choose 'Reveal file'.

This will take you to the correct directory in this case we're working with Linked Media and we know that because of the icons on our clips. So now that I know which media it is I can just go up a level and here's the folder and I can back this up. If you're working with media that's been ingested into Media Composer it's a little more complex. You're probably going to want to use the consolidate or transcode tools to combine all of your media into a new drive. The challenge of course is if you select a sequence and right click and choose consolidate/transcode, you only get to choose a drive not a sub-folder when you do this.

So you're probably going to want to connect a new drive in order to pull all those files together. Once you've got your media and your project files backed up, you're ready to clear out the storage on your machine.