Dialogue Editing

86 BURN-INS, FILE NAMES, AND BACKUPS
growing, dialogue doesn’t generate a lot of new fi les after the OMF import
and/or auto-assembly, so you can do one big backup at the beginning of the
project and most of the work is done. Still, you have to back up daily the
handful of new fi les you inevitably generate: the bounces, consolidations, and
processed regions. Open your session without them and you’ll face embarrassing
holes. Also, any destructive process, such as Pro Tool’s pencil tool,
alters your originals. Such modifi cations aren’t stored with the session, but
rather exist as changes in the underlying soundfi le, which must be backed
up once again or the changes won’t show up in reconstituted projects.
Finally, don’t forget to back up your ADR fi les. Say you record an ADR session
from a remote location via ISDN and then trip on the drive’s power cable,
smashing the drive and its contents to pieces. Who’s going to look stupid?
Back it up.
By far the easiest way to back up a session’s new soundfi les and keep them
up to date is with a backup utility such as Mezzo or Retrospect. 7 Whether
you back up to a FireWire drive, a DVD, a tape drive, or across a network,
backup programs keep track of changes to your drive since the last backup
session and incrementally copy only what’s necessary.
Without special software you can still manage your backups with confi dence;
it’s just a bit more work. After the OMF and autoconform are opened and
you’ve created your master sessions (one per reel), copy the entire project to
a large FireWire backup drive. On your work drive, label (color code) all of
the fi les that have been copied.
• As you edit, pay attention to where you put new soundfi les. Fewer
target folders mean fewer places to look for them.
• At the end of each work day, open all of the folders to which you’ve
been adding soundfi les. Sort by modifi cation date, and the new, unprotected
fi les will come to the top. These new fi les won’t carry a color
label since they haven’t been copied to the backup drive. Copy them
(from every applicable folder) to the backup drive now. Previously
copied soundfi les that have undergone destructive changes—such as
with Pro Tools’ pencil—will sort near the top of the list because they
were recently modifi ed, but they’ll carry a color label from previous
backups, making them a bit harder to fi nd.
• Don’t forget to copy your session fi les.
• Finally, color label the newly copied fi les to indicate that they’ve been
backed up.
7 Mezzo is a product of Grey Matter Response. Retrospect is made by EMC Dantz.