Does version control have a part in the video production workflow? 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.
Version control in the sense of Git isn't very practical in the video world. You would need to make a specific version control tool for every audio and video tool out there as all work with their own project formats.
But being able to read these formats is just one thing, then you also need the render engine of that tool to show diff's.

Though all of these tools work in a non-destructive way unless you pre-render some stuff (compare that to compiling a dll/lib of a piece of your code and work with that from now on), so you ususally can just go back to an old revision by doing ctrl+z or using the history tool in some programs.

Though saving sub versions is usually the way to go. Like stib described in his answer or by doing it manually.

Something I like to do and works well with every software is putting my project files (no source footage) into Dropbox. If you have a somewhat fast upload speed (~1 Mbit/s) and your project file isn't 100MB+, you can upload your project before you save the next time. An average Premiere/AE/FCP project is around 10-20MB so your recently saved files will be uploaded in 1-2 minutes. Even faster if you have more upload bandwidth.

Then if you have to go back you can access Dropbox's history of your files and download or restore to that revision. Dropbox saves file revisions forever* on a paid account (*atleast when they had the pack rat option, now its a year I think) and for 30 days on a free account. I'm sure that there are other cloud hosters that offer similar features.
It's a bit like using a super limited version of git that handles binary files very well and is headache free.
This has the advantage that you don't clutter the folder with tons of files and have a backup at the same time.

Most cloud hosters also offer Team Memberships so you can work with multiple editors. Or you share the project folder with other team members.