Drive tracking for film production
A shooting day produces media that will pass through six sets of hands before anyone cuts with it. Vault Buddy records each pass.
Where drives go missing on a production
- The end of a shoot day. Cards and shuttles move fast at wrap, which is exactly when nobody is writing anything down.
- Vendor handoffs. A drive goes to a post house, a colourist, or a VFX vendor and leaves your visibility entirely.
- Unit moves. Drives travel between locations in a case that several people have keys to.
- Wrap. The production ends, crew disperse, and drives stay in the cars and closets of people who no longer work there.
What the workflow looks like
- Every shuttle and archive drive gets a record with its serial number and the project it belongs to.
- A QR label goes on the drive. Handoffs on the day are a scan rather than a form.
- The DIT snapshots a drive before it leaves, so there is a record of what was on it at the moment it changed hands.
- Drives out to vendors carry a due date, so an overdue drive raises itself while the production still exists.
- At wrap, the outstanding-drive list is a page rather than an archaeology project.
For the insurance conversation
If footage is lost or a drive is damaged, the carrier will ask who was holding it. A chain-of-custody report answers that with names, timestamps, and signatures, exported as a PDF. Reconstructing the same answer from call sheets and text threads is the situation the record exists to avoid.
Both sides of the handoff
When you loan a drive to someone with a Vault Buddy account, they get the matching record. Receiving drives is unlimited on every plan including Free, so a vendor or a freelancer can hold up their end without being asked to buy anything.