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DLT tape archive that will catalog as a library too.
In my research on going tapeless earlier in the year I remember someone mentioning that there are DLT (in the generic term) tape archive systems that will catalog as a library too.
I can’t seem to find that information again.
Can someone refresh my mind?
Thanks
Steve Cohen
Supervisor of Post Production
O2 Media Inc. -
13 Replies
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It’s LTO4 and it’s from Cache-A
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Thanks Jeremy;
I thought it was you that mentioned it to me before, but I could not find that post again for the life of me.
We seem to be getting closer to finalizing something, so hopefully we will have it ironed out soon.
Thanks again;
Steve Cohen
Supervisor of Post Production
O2 Media Inc. -
No worries!
Jeremy
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Look for LTO 5 soon.
Steve Eisen
Eisen Video Productions
Vice President
Chicago Final Cut Pro Users Group -
Wow, DLT? really? We dropped it years ago as slow, expensive, unreliable and did I say SLOOOW?
Just using external hard drives now. Or for DVD replication a master disc.
Non-linear: all the time and nothing but.
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[Robb Harriss] “Wow, DLT? really?”
No, not really. It’s LTO4. 😉
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LTO is, by far, the reliable BU solution.
DLT is the most reliable DVD submission format as well. Hope you dont have a HDD fail or blow a glass master in the near future! 🙂 -
Hope your tape, or drive, doesn’t fail. 🙂
same can be said of any technology. The BEST solution is redundancy. That’s one of the major benefits of shooting on tape or film. Your camera originals are the ultimate backup. I spent years on digital non-linear systems that had no backup other than the EDLs we’d save. In those days it was much faster to just reload from the videotapes than using the tape backups my competitors on Avid used. What took them a day or so (lost revenue) took me a couple of hours.
As I said we abandoned DLT for DVD replication about 5 years ago. We had lots of issues with the DLT tapes, interchange issues, random failures with no logical error messages. Switching to a disc required a lot of dancing with the replication vendors, but we got it done, even internationally in about a dozen countries. DVD studio Pro is all setup to do it. We only had one issue and that was in China when they went to replicate one of our shows. There was some difference in the flags put on the DVD by DSP. Turns out they were using really old software that had to be updated.
I like hard drive (I really should say “hard drives”) because of speed and accuracy. Our shows never really go into the vault. There always some small change years later. We just redid a Danish version first completed in 2003. Hard drives let me archive the new version in just a few seconds, since only the new changed data is added to the hard drive. Using other methods I have to start all over. Some times that was 10 or 12 hours of waiting, and then for a second copy? Ow.
But again, it’s not about the media, tape, file, disc or drive. It’s about redundancy. That’s partly why my vault room is full. And the current challenge is moving stuff offsite for yet another level of security. Another whole set of headaches.Non-linear: all the time and nothing but.
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I think we’re missing the “library” aspect of this discussion. Maybe you’re thinking of something like Final Cut Server to “library” your shots.
I’ve been using CATDv to log and library our footage for the last year. It’s worked out very well for us. I let it make proxies of the footage with a window-burn. Those I save in a special place on my server. In that way I can remove the footage from one of the editing systems, and yet have full access to the footage and log notes to find anything for future work. One interesting thing for us, as documentarians, it can pull in the full written transcripts of the interview footage, complete with time code. It just pops into what they call the Verbatim Logger. You can then even do word searches in there and it will pop right to the shot. Now that was cool and helped a bunch on the last project: “Didn’t Shari say XYZ?” and bingo, there it was without having to listen to a single frame.
You can also construct basic timelines in the system which then open directly in Final Cut. That helped a lot on deadline when the writer would put a little something together based on his thoughts, and I was able to simply open it in Final Cut and it was populated with the original footage.Non-linear: all the time and nothing but.
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No doubt catdv is the bees knees.
Cache-A has an extremely simple
database that allows searching.As far as redundancy, we keep a set
local and a set offsite.As far as speed, it runs at about 68-70 megabytes/sec so FireWire 800 speed. When tranferring 800 gigs from a single drive of any type will take a bit of time.
We thought long and hard about what to get. We had over 35 sata drives sitting on the shelf, it was time to either purchase another set of drives to add redundancy, or look for
something else. At the time, LTO was really the only cost effective way to do it. Buying
40TBs worth of raid protection, or 40TBs of more SATA drives, plus a server to run catalog software that could be run throughout our ‘facility’ wasn’t making much sense for a number of reasons. The LTO tapes are cheap, easily transportable and the CAche-A has it’s own web server with a rudimentary catalog that can be acessed from any computer on the network. It made the most sense at the time, and it is still making sense for the forseeable future. In the process of archving the 40TBs to LTO, one of our newer 1TBs drives failed to spin up. It’s gone and lost forever even after sending it to Drivesavers. Now, even if something happens to our office, the offsite tapes are safe. It’s worth at least throwing in to your pile of considerations for long term archive.
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