Why can’t I have my source files?

A question we get asked a lot is ‘why can’t we have the project source files sent to us in its entirety?’ So in this STM Blog, we’ll do you a solid and answer it!

WHAT ARE SOURCE FILES?

Source files with regards to video are the original, raw versions of everything that was filmed. 

CAN YOU SEND US THE SOURCE FILES?

A lot of people want to know, can we just send everything you filmed?

Close your eyes (don’t, carry on reading) and imagine this. We’ve come to put together a video idea of yours. Maybe we filmed a few interviews. Let’s be more specific; maybe we filmed two or three interviews in a day and gathered all this footage.

We edit, we send it to you and then you say, ‘can you send it all, so we can see it all?’

What would we say? ‘No. That’s a bad idea.’

WHY?

We film a lot of stuff.

You might underestimate how much we film throughout a day.

Let’s take the example of a two minute video.

We’ve interviewed three people. Each of those interviews have gone on for, let’s say 15 minutes, right?

Straight away, we’ve got 45 minutes of just interview footage.

Now we have to cut that down to the bare bones of what we want out of those interviews.

In doing so, we’ve made a tonne of decisions without asking you, taken all that stress off you of what we want to include and excluded loads of footage that we didn’t need. 

However, we haven’t completely edited everything.

We’ve kept the good things in there, and maybe we’ll have to cut a bit more, but we’ve trimmed out all the fat. 

We’ve taken out all the little slip ups that people make, or the questions that we might be asking and got it down to what we think is the best stuff.

BUT PLEASE, I’M DOING AN IN-HOUSE PROJECT AND FOOTAGE WOULD BE USEFUL!

Ok, no need to get upset. If we’re talking about using the raw files for different projects, or you want to keep them because you might want to edit something in the future or create an in-house project because you have an employee who knows how to edit the footage, we’re happy to do that, absolutely no problem.

The only issue with this is sending those large files.

HOW CAN YOU SEND LARGE SOURCE FILES?

So what we would usually do is ask you to purchase a hard drive, send it to our office, and we’ll happily put all that footage on that hard drive and send it to you, or give it to you when we see you in the flesh.

But be warned, if you want to watch the source files, because you want to review everything we’ve filmed;

  • You probably won’t watch all the footage anyway, honestly there’s loads
  • They’re huge files, so they’re very difficult to send through the internet.
  • There’s a reason why we cut them in the first place.

IN CONCLUSION

Don’t worry about it.

If you do want the source files for a future date, we can sort that out. There are ways around it. 

But for the other stuff, just trust us. 

We hope you found that blog useful and that it’s answered the question of why we don’t send everything we film over to you.

And if you want any other information about video production or animation, we’ve got tonnes of blogs and videos just like this one in our knowledge centre and on our YouTube channel.

But if we haven’t touched on a topic yet that you might want the answer to, contact us today and someone at Stone’s Throw will answer them.

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