I'm a software developer and I'm also interested in photography (for four years) and video production (for a few months only).
■ In software development, there is an important rule every developer follows on every project: everything should be under version control: source code, configuration files, database schema, documentation—everything which enables building the project from scratch. This has two pleasant consequences:
In an event of a disaster when you lose everything except the version control repository, you should be able to continue as if nothing happened.
In an event of some stupid change which negatively affects the project, the developer can come back to an earlier revision.
■ In photography, every change I make to photos is stored forever in Lightroom catalog, making it possible to revert to previous state at any moment. With virtual copies feature, Lightroom also enables to do what is called a branch in version control: the ability to test something different, and either keep both results or remove one of them later.
The catalog doesn't store the RAW photos themselves, but they don't change anyway.
■ In video production, things seem different. I work with Premiere Pro, After Effects and Soundbooth.
None seem to store history permanently: if I do an action by mistake and notice it only the next day, there is no way to recover the previous version.
Soundbooth also changes directly the WAV files, which requires an additional effort to keep separate the original recordings from the modified ones.
Version control is rarely mentioned, and I haven't found anyone telling how does he actually use version control in his workflow. Moreover, nobody mentions which version control should be used, and since most version control systems are optimized for text files, not binary ones, this creates an additional challenge.
Video.SE doesn't have version-control or revisions tags.
Thus, I have two questions:
Does version control have a part in the workflow of a person who works with video production? How is it integrated?
Would migrating to Adobe Creative Cloud help? Are there specific features which allow, in Creative Cloud, to track successive revisions of a Premiere Pro or After Effects project?
Remark: to avoid off-topic answers, I highlight that my question is unrelated to the backups, and is specifically about storing successive revisions of my work, not having an on-site/off-site backup of the data.