The Advantages of Cloud Storage for Video Archiving
Video content is (still) on the rise. With the ever increasing growth and prevalence of social media platforms, including the likes of TikTok and Instagram used by both young and old, more and more video is being both consumed and produced by social media users themselves, with companies across the board quickly jumping on this trend to benefit from increased leads, sales, and audience understanding as just a few of the benefits from incorporating video content into marketing strategies (Falaschi, 2021).
Where to store all this video content?
It’s not just marketers who need to find somewhere to stockpile hundreds of hours of video footage. Film-makers too have faced the issue of trying to maintain years worth of Hollywood video tapes in old-fashioned, off-line archives for a long time — as well as finding them, with many of these tapes becoming lost within huge archives.
The problems generated from these types of traditional archiving are therefore wide-scale — from the cost of maintenance being huge, to the ‘sad truth’ that film archives only last a short time, with huge effort required to keep them alive. To preserve film at its best, it must be disturbed as little as possible to avoid scratches, fingerprints and dust that will inevitably destroy the integrity of the film.
As Perlmutter (2017) puts it:
It’s like having a museum where none of the art is ever on display.
As a result of this difficulty of preservation of offline archives, digital archiving is booming, and particularly the growing use of cloud storage as means to store all this content.
What are the advantages of digital archiving?
As Falaschi (2021) defines in ‘What to Look for in a Video Archive Solution’ an effective video archiving system will secure and organise video files so they are ‘safe, searchable and easy to access’.
The benefits of online video storage, particularly cloud storage versus offline, are in general obvious — with ease of accessibility to video content being a huge advantage of switching to this form of archiving. Having copies of any video you need for yourself or your team all stored in one place, that can be categorised in order to find your footage with ease and at speed.
The ‘cloud’ can also be used as a ‘real-time back up’ of actual video projects, meaning active projects can be saved immediately to the cloud, with no fear of losing the content. Of course, there is also the advantage of using the cloud as a long-term archive, with the ability to store video content from years ago, to years to come, with no fear of this content becoming damaged and unusable from environmental factors such as waste, insects, fire hazards, etc, or human damage — including the obvious accidental scratches and scrapes.
Additionally, yet another problem filmmakers have faced in the past is the issue of misplacing film tapes. With cloud storage, there is no risk of this, making the platform a reliable and suitable online storage for all your footage, with high security levels.
Furthermore, the warranty of hard drives is short — adding more reason to switch to storing video content online in order to have this crucial content backed up effectively at very little cost, without the need of users needing to manage the content themselves (Cooper, 2020).
The Covid-19 pandemic has also seen a crucial need for video editors to be able to edit video from home, with access to offices storing critical footage no longer an option. The ability of cloud storage in allowing remote teams to access and edit their video content with ease from the comfort of their home, is therefore a highly attractive advantage of this kind of digital archiving.
Increasingly, video editing platforms are incorporating the offering of cloud storage into their platforms as an incredibly handy, ‘bonus’ feature. For all video editors, marketers, and filmmakers alike, this is an incredibly attractive feature to bring to the table.
I think we can all agree that any video editing software incorporating cloud storage as a hugely reliable, easily accessible, and cheap alternative to offline archiving is an irresistible offering that shouldn’t be underestimated. Keep your eyes peeled for the smart platforms offering it, including our own video search platform, NOVA A.I, offering a 100% searchable cloud storage feature for busy content creators. Head to PromoMii to find out more.
References:
- Falaschi, A (2021), ‘What to look for in a Video Archive Solution’, Widen, 9 March 2021. Available at: https://www.widen.com/blog/what-to-look-for-in-a-video-archive-solution (Accessed: 24 June)
- Perlmutter, M (2017) ‘The Lost Picture Show: Hollywood Archivists Can’t Outpace Obsolescence’, Spectrum, 28 April 2017. Available at: https://spectrum.ieee.org/computing/it/the-lost-picture-show-hollywood-archivists-cant-outpace-obsolescence (Accessed: 24 June)
- Cooper, M (2020), ‘How are Video Editors Using Cloud Storage’ Promax, April 12 2021. Available at: https://www.promax.com/blog/how-are-video-editors-using-cloud-storage (Accessed: 24 June)
