Whether you work with film or video, it is a good idea to make back up and/or viewing copies of your piece. This is useful for casual viewing and for providing an insurance copy to be stored in a separate location.

This section introduces some of the background issues that accompany making copies such as the establishment of a master, the practicalities of DVD copies, and the issues surrounding limited editions. For format specific copy information, please go to the film and video sections.

If you're planning to make copies of an older work, you'll have to establish a master, or original version to take copies from. Depending on the status of the piece and the effort to which you are prepared to go, this could mean going substantially further a-field, tracking down other copies and possibly even deciding, what is the definitive version. This may even require comparing versions running side-by-side. (This is common for people working in restoration and in these instances may result in a composite master made up of the best available material from several different sources.) This highlights the potential importance of not only original documentation but also good communication with other holders of artist moving images.

Artists working on new material can save themselves a lot of this later work, partly through careful documentation, but also by creating a formal master at the outset and putting it into storage. For technical information about video mastering, go to the appropriate part on the video section.

DVD copies
While DVDs are easy to make and becoming ever more prevalent, you should think carefully about how you decide to use them, should you choose to do so. They can be very useful as viewing or consultation copies but are not appropriate as a master format. DVDs are highly compressed, which means that you lose information as soon as they're made. It also means the information is highly unstable and a scratch could potentially ruin the whole disc.

It is worth remembering that there are occasionally interface problems between the disc and different players, and that high quality tape formats can also look better than DVDs when projected. Tape formats are also more physically robust.

Limited Editions
If you intend to show work in the gallery with a commercial interest in mind, the issue of limited editions has important practical considerations.

By agreeing to make a limited number of copies of your piece, you are correspondingly restricted from making back-up copies or even preservation purpose transfers. In this instance the status of your work as an individual art object is significantly elevated. In the future, this may mean that once the equipment necessary to view your format becomes obsolete (a pertinent issue with any video format) or the copies themselves begin to deteriorate, it may be problematic to arrange transfer to a new readable format.