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P2 Archival Solution – Quantum SDLT600A
I am in the process of testing a P2 archive solution with Quantum’s SDLT600A tape drive and Imagine’s HD Log logging software. Anyone out there got any experience with the SDLT600A? Also, does anyone have an idea what the potential demand might be for an MXF-aware video archive solution. Thanks.
Stuart Huggins – Multimedia Designer
:|: Technical Artistry &
Digital Design Productions, LLC:|: de*****@*************ns.com
:|: 678.290.0966:|: Creative ingenuity, technical prowess.
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14 Replies
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No message, just seeing how this goes for you as I am interested.
Jeremy
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[TADD Productions] “I am in the process of testing a P2 archive solution with Quantum’s SDLT600A tape drive and Imagine’s HD Log logging software. Anyone out there got any experience with the SDLT600A? Also, does anyone have an idea what the potential demand might be for an MXF-aware video archive solution.”
The demand will grow as P2 card capacities increase and more users adopt the P2 workflow.
If Apple decides to bless us with native MXF support, I believe the potential is much greater.
Just my 2
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Jeremy,
I completed my test of this solution a few months ago. After careful consideration of this solution, I choose to return the demo unit to Quantum. Until the price drops significantly on this DLT drive, I will not be an owner. The DLT hardware met my expectations, however, the bundled software (including FTP server) was inadequate.
Stuart Huggins
Multimedia DesignerTechnical Artistry &
Digital Design Productions, LLC
http://www.taddproductions.com -
Arthur,
I completed my test of this solution a few months ago. After careful consideration of this drive’s effectiveness, I choose to return the demo unit to Quantum. Until the price drops significantly on this DLT drive, I will not become an owner. The DLT hardware met my expectations, however, the bundled software (including FTP server) was inadequate.
With or without the SDLT600A, I am still very excited about the P2/FCP workflow. I have managed to squeeze additional time/cost savings from this combination and I look forward to further developments in this area…
Stuart Huggins
Multimedia DesignerTechnical Artistry &
Digital Design Productions, LLC
http://www.taddproductions.com -
There were 2 interesting announcements from Quantum regarding MXF tape drives.
First, Quantum announced a new LTO drive that is twice as fast (70MB/sec) and greater capacity (400GB) for the same price as the 600A (about $8K list).
They also announced a price reduction on the 600A to $5500 list. You should be able to aquire that for close to $4000.
There have been several improvements to the interface, via free firmware updates.
I also spoke to the Quantum engineers at NAB, amd they seem very interested and dedicated to improving the interface.
–
Art AldrichLeader, NJ FCP UG
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Art,
Great news! Thanks for the update. I’ll keep my finger on the pulse…
Stuart Huggins
Multimedia DesignerTechnical Artistry &
Digital Design Productions, LLC
http://www.taddproductions.com -
Thank you so much for the updates. I have been backing up to SATA with great success.
Jeremy
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i’ve had one of these units for a few months now and i can’t sing its praises loud enough. i havent really explored its MXF-aware capabilities yet, however. i bought it needing a way to clear off our Xsan and archive 1.5 years of projects ranging from feature films to episodic TV to podcasts and web. i needed about 4TB of archive space in-house and would also need a second copy to be stored out of house. and i didnt want to deal with hard drives as i have been burned in the past on failed hard drives. granted its a bit slow – it averages about 30MB/s on our GigE network, but it has allowed us to archive many projects, and in the case of a few, bring them back online into FCP with all media reconnected in about 3 hours for a 70min feature film. imagine doing that from DVD-R media.
we use a program called AutoCat that will catalog the contents of the tape, then we copy this catalog (which is just OS X aliases and folders, just like Finder. you dont need another program to read the catalog) over to our server. this allows us to do a Spotlight search for a clip, then Spotlight tells us what tape its on, then we grab the tape and transfer the clip via the 600a’s web-based FTP to any ANY computer in the office.
another thing thats much different than the old DLT workflow is that this drive is very fast. the directory is available in about 15 seconds, and it can find a file anywhere on the tape in less than 2 minutes at the most.
at the level that we work at, we are used to $65k for an HDCAM deck using $55 60min tapes. many of our competitors just copy their P2 footage to HDCAM because that is what they are used to. they know they have a tape. many broadcasters do that with their HDV footage too. they can’t really imagine a tapeless world and in most cases need a 1080i copy on hand that will work with an HD-SDI system. HDCAM is convenient. my bosses are a bit like this too. a 300GB SDLT tape is $78 and can hold 30min of Uncompressed 10-bit HD, 5 hours of DVCPRO HD 1080i60, or 14 hours of 720p24 footage. thats a big savings over Varicam, HDCAM or HDCAM SR tape.
when we mastered our last feature, it fit on 2 SDLT tapes as both a media managed project and a final Quicktime that we used for printing to HDCAM. this also included every alternate version of the movie with all the different graphics and soundtracks. because we used this method, we only had to print a third as many HDCAM tapes for our library and our distributors. this has saved us quite a bit of money.
some people say the deck is too expensive and hard drives are cheap (and getting cheaper). but when your alternatives are a 1400 Varicam deck for $25k, $65k for an HDCAM deck, or hard drives that have a reliable shelf life of only 5 years, a $5k SDLT deck really starts to look like a steal. and like a previous post, when Apple adds native MXF support to FCP, this system will become even more valuable. you can really think of it as a data VCR. for my workflow, it has been a huge time, money and space saver.
theres very few people who have used one of these decks, so please feel free to ask me any questions. i took a risk when i bought this thing because there wasnt much experience out there to draw on, but i’m so glad that i did.
e
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Eric, thanks for the info. Can you tell me about the ‘600GB compressed’ capacity? Does this work? Can I really expect to get 600GB of data per cartridge?
Thanks,
Parke -
No. i contacted Quantum with the same question and they explained it like this: video files are typically already partially compressed (except for Uncompressed codecs), so you would never get 600GB capacity because the 600A’s internal hardware compression wouldnt be able to compress the file much more than Quicktime has already. the 2:1 compression that tape drives typically employ is based on storing pure data files like Word and Excel Docs or things like that. since compression is part of most video codecs, the internal compression in the 600A would just slow things way down and not necessarily help with file sizes. i leave it off, which is what Quantum recommends for video.
since the deck and tape are OS agnostic, it acts in a weird way with files that have no extension. like .mov Quicktime files that have “hide extension” checked in the Get Info field. any video file that Final Cut captures from a video tape is this way. if you move a quicktime file with no extension to SDLT, then move it back to you local hard drive, Mac OS wont recognize the file as a video file and Final Cut wont reconnect to it. if you “un-hide” the extension before you move it to SDLT, then move it to SDLT and move it back, Final Cut wont reconnect to it because the file didnt have an extension in the edit, so to Final Cut its a different file. i have no experience with Windows with this deck, but i imagine it would be similar.
my point with the last story: our solution to storing quicktime files without extensions is to put them into a new folder and zip it. this folder is typically our Media Manager folder with all Media from the project. this conserves all the video files’ properties and it also compresses the files better than the 600A’s internal compressor. DV files compress quite a bit (4:1 or better) and DVCPRO HD is about 1.5:1. most graphics files wont compress at all. it is an additional time consuming step depending on how much you need to zip and how fast your computer is, but it also protects the integrity of the data and saves space. with MXF files from P2, you dont need to take this step, and you shouldnt since the 600A can read MXF metadata. depending on your workflow, this whole file extension thing may be a non-issue.
so for our 70min feature film, the Media Manager folder was a 90GB compressed zip file (probably 200GB+ uncompressed). if i needed one small file from that zip, i would move the zip off the deck (takes about an hour or so), then open the zip directory (not the whole file) with Zipeg. then i select the one file i need and Zipeg extracts that one file instead of unarchiving the entire zip file. typically we try to keep our zip files under 30GB so we dont have to constantly move huge zips for one small file. it sounds complicated, but we havent had a problem thus far. even if Quantum made a fix for this, i probably would still zip files because it saves so much space over hardware compression.
e
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