07-25-2024, 07:12 PM
sekker wrote:
[quote=clay]
good article. I think about this stuff all the time with archived projects. Even just stuff that sits on my shelves. 10-15 years after a project is done, would I even be able to open it to change something, or would we need to start from scratch? I think about video projects that I did in classic Final Cut Pro. I still have 1 vintage Mac available if it came to that, but I probably would be recreating edits, transitions, titles, graphics, etc. Same story with audio, as noted in the article. I've stuck with the same DAW since I started back in 2007 (Digital Performer), but I have to imagine that projects I did back then would be somewhat tricky to open up again (even without any plugins in play) to update those mixes.
Fortunately, I don't often get calls to "update" mixes or videos. More often it's to grab some source material to use again elsewhere. I did get a call this spring to pull out a session from 2014 for a client, and I was able to open it up on my current machine with few issues.
I have two Macs for this reason, one that can go all the way back to Leopard.
I figure it'll be one of my projects in the next decade to properly archive all of our old digital photos.
Yeah, I guess the biggest challenge once you have a Mac that can run the software is to get the right version of a program that can open the project file. Sometimes there's no good forward or backward route to get what you need, unless you have carefully documented and/or downloaded every last piece of software (or update) that you need. As companies age, you can't always count on being able to download a new copy of some program or update, etc.
The raw data (or photo or footage or audio, etc) is usually there, it's the extra layer of whatever program that you used to create the "thing" that is sometimes elusive to recreate.
Probably one of the reasons I keep my personal photo archive as a simple files/folder/year structure. That will never go out of style...