Ingest

Footage's border crossing into the system: cards copied, verified, named, backed up, before anyone breathes out.

Ingest is the most dangerous hour in any production's life: the material exists only on camera cards, and every step, copy, checksum, duplicate, rename, log, stands between the day's work and its permanence. Nothing else in the pipeline can lose as much as carelessly as this stage can.

The protocol is deliberately paranoid: two independent copies verified by checksum before a card is cleared, names applied by convention, proxies struck for the edit. It is also where metadata is cheapest to attach, scene, take, day, while memory is fresh. Ingest done properly is invisible forever after; done casually, it is famous for a very long time.