Wedding Photographer Workflow
A Memory Card Failure on the most important day in your life ?
Today we ran out into a strange scenario, a Card failure. Thought we recovered it, As professional photographers its our primary responsibility to take care of these.
Normally at the completion of the day, we do backup the data on event location/site after the event but for strange reason our videographers card was showing empty. In other words memory card which the data was recorded was showing zero files, 5 hours of the wedding video footage was just Lost. The Video footage we lost was close to 30gb in size. This scenario seems to be unexpected for any photographers/videographers who shoot wedding, but memory cards but do fail even though we do double check before the shoot.
Would anyone of you take that as as answer if your photographer/videographer lost the whole video/photos of your wedding?
Firstly, you would get mad at the photographers/team who shot your wedding all day long. But is it their fault ? I guess not. Would this scenario be avoided ? It depends on how worst is the issue, is the photographer prepared to take proper steps to recover so on so forth.
Though these scenario may not happen that frequently but we would like to point out these things may happen anytime to anyone. Most of well know photographers/indian photographers have proper workflow in place which avoid loss of data, card failure recovery plans in place, but there are many others who don’t even care of these primary things that are necessary to provide any client who books them for their wedding.
We would like you to understand its important for you to hire a professionals who knows how to handle these scenario or who have proper work flow to avoid these unexpected issues. Many amateur photographers turn up saying they can shoot the wedding for a certain package and failed to deliver as expected. And think about an amateur photographers in the scenario as above what would be the answer be?
Are you willing to take that risk with regards your wedding pictures ?
As for vividsaaga, we have these covered for all of our valuable clients. Here is a general our work flow How we do, What we do?
Vividsaaga Workflow
- Memory Cards: We only use professional cards from Lexar which have minimum failure rate and made to perform. Lexar is one of the most reliable card makers out there in the market. Lexar also do provide software recovery software for their professional cards in case of their cards failure for most of the scenarios.
- GEAR/Canon 5d Mark 3: We shoot with professional cameras that has two memory cards, these are set up to record each image to both cards one backing up the other in other words Dual cards writing. We do record raw files separately in CF cards and SDHC for JPEG if case senious. Take a look of what we have in our bags.
- BACKup & BACKup : At the completion of the day, we do backup our cards onsite into external hard drives and once get back home/office we get same data / untouched raw data backup on other hard drive before we start out editing work. This helps us to avoid any issues from the hard drives.
- Non – Destructive Edit: While editing we don’t edit the original files we do non-destructive edits while keeping the original data/images safe ! We do use Lightroom for editing/tweaking the images for the final output. For Video we are using Final Cut Pro/Premier both softwares do support non destructive edits.
- BACKUP ONLINE: We do backup our processed content/images online for the extra bit of safety due to natural calamities.
- We do have that covered with paid Memory Card Recovery Softwares running on our laptops used for on site backups to recover the data as soon as possible.
Did we recover what we lost ?
Yes we did recover all the data 100%. We dint loss any of the video footage and we delivered it to client. So far we dint have any issues of losing any content but hardware issues happen for unknown reason though we take care of the cards properly.Preparing for the worst,is the key for us. So do keep in mind when you hire someone to shoot your wedding cross check with the workflow, backup system which the photographers/team have in their operations.
It’s your big day please don’t take these things for granted.
Its your responsibility to take time hiring the right professionals for your wedding. Indian wedding photographers is huge market selecting the right one for you is most important. You would need to talk to your photographer about how your wedding should be covered and cross check the style if you like the style,output, albums design and properly organised teams so that nothing would go wrong on your big day.
