Back up a production
Generate a downloadable archive of a production — its breakdown, its photos and its documents — organised the way you need it, for delivery, handover or your own records.
A production is finished long before people stop asking about it. Deliveries, insurance, a network query about a scene, a director wanting the continuity two years later. A backup is the copy you keep for that.
It is also the answer to the reasonable question of what happens to your work if you stop using SceneMatch: you can take it with you, in a form that opens without any software.
Requesting one
Ask for a backup from the production's Backup page. Generating it takes a while — the archive is built in the background, and the page shows its progress rather than making you wait on it. You will see it move from queued, to generating, to ready to download.
Large productions with a lot of photography naturally take longer than small ones.
Choosing what goes in
A backup is not all-or-nothing. You choose which parts of the production to include:
- Scenes and takes
- Characters, actors and per-scene character continuity
- Looks
- Wardrobe, props, vehicles and animals
- Sets
- Documents
So a costume handover can be a wardrobe-and-looks archive rather than the entire production, which keeps the file to something you can actually send.
Choosing how it is organised
Three options shape the archive itself, and they matter more than they look:
- Folder structure — how the archive is arranged. Organising by character is right for a continuity archive; other structures suit other readers.
- Image size — full-resolution photographs make a faithful archive and a very large file. A smaller size makes something that can be emailed.
- Scene description detail — how much of each scene's text comes along.
If the backup is for delivery, favour completeness. If it is for someone to actually look through this afternoon, favour a smaller image size.
Availability
A generated backup stays available for a few days and is then cleared. That is deliberate: the archive is a copy of data that keeps changing, and an old one sitting around is more likely to mislead than help.
Download it when it is ready rather than leaving it. If it expires, or if the production has moved on since, request another.
Only one backup exists at a time. While one is queued, building or waiting to be downloaded, a new request is refused — so if you need a fresher archive than the one sitting there, clear the current one first and then request a new build. There is no limit on how many you generate over time, only on how many exist at once.
The thing that is not obvious
A backup is a snapshot, not a sync. It reflects the production at the moment it was generated. Photos added afterwards are not in it, and it does not update itself.
So a backup taken at wrap is a record of wrap. If you want a record of delivery, take another at delivery. The cost of generating one is time, not money, which makes taking several at meaningful points the right habit — rather than treating one archive as permanently authoritative.
Take one before a production lapses
A suspended production cannot generate a backup. When a plan lapses, every section of the production closes except Billing — including this one. The work is not deleted and nothing is lost, but the archive cannot be built until the plan is current again.
So if a production is winding down, or you are unsure whether its plan will be renewed, generate and download the backup while it is still active. See billing and plans.
Who can request one
Backups follow the production's access rules — see roles and departments. Since an archive necessarily contains everything you selected, regardless of department, it is worth being deliberate about who can generate one on a production where departments are kept apart.