Anyone still using any tape decks? Beta? Or anything standard-def?

[Andrew Rendell]

Well, yes I’m still delivering tape to some broadcasters, but I don’t own any decks, I go to a facility for that.

[Scott Sheriff]

I wouldn’t mind having a 1″ like a Hitachi HR series, or a Sony 2000. Neither have a huge footprint, and are both pretty reliable if treated well.

Scott Sheriff
SST Digital Media
Multi-Camera Director, VFX and Post Production

The Affordable Camera Dolly is your just right solution!

“If you think it’s expensive to hire a professional to do the job, wait until you hire an amateur.” —Red Adair

[Todd Terry]

[Andrew Rendell] “Well, yes I’m still delivering tape to some broadcasters”

That’s interesting. Maybe that means I’ll still be able to find a buyer for these boxes of useless Beta stock 🙂

We haven’t delivered a physical tape to a broadcaster in probably a couple of years now… we produce mostly television commercials and they are just FTP’d to wherever they need to go. Weirdly enough though one station in our home market (the NBC affiliate) still gets standard-def NTSC uploads… and they are the only one of the several dozen stations and cable outlets that we regularly send to. Every other one gets 1080i or 720p. Even stranger is that this holdout station was the first one in this market to go HD… first to have an HD signal, first to pass on network in HD, and first to broadcast local news and other programming in HD. For commercials though, it still has to be NTSC and they don’t know when that’s gonna change (“Oh we hope we can take HD someday”).

T2

__________________________________
Todd Terry
Creative Director
Fantastic Plastic Entertainment, Inc.
fantasticplastic.com

[Mark Suszko]

I’m with Ned and Todd.

We still acquire on tape, in DVCProSD and HD. We just this year got P2 cams over my strenuous objections, and the adaptation to that is an ongoing process. Meanwhile we have TONS of legacy tape we’ve been transferring off to DVD-R. Like Todd, we figure much of it will never be seen. However, we feel a strong duty to the future to preserve things that might be useful to some future documentarians.
One of the requests for historic footage we get a lot is for footage of President Obama when he was a first-term state senator. Well, back then who knew that any of that stuff was ever going to be needed after it originally aired. You can’t know what the future is going to find very important, and in a way it’s not your business to judge.

As to formats goting out from here: we’re trying to do more and more FTP and posting to the web, however, we still get requests for Betacam dubs. We still have working betacam and umatic gear. We got rid of our two one-inch machines, but I was able to help arrange an outside consultant to acquire a good used one just like our old ones, and he got to transfer off our one-inch masters. Just this week we found another one we’d missed, so though he thinks about getting rid of the beast, he holds on because there’s lots of institutions that have legacy tape needing a bump into the future.

The broadcast world isn’t as monolithic as some folks think: not every place updates on the same time frame. Old gear has a way of hanging on, often for pure reasons of economics, where it’s amortized and cheaper to keep on paper than to dispose of it and upgrade. And upgrades often come incrementally, working their way back from the “stick”, to the transmitter, to the things that feed into the TX, to the things that feed the things… you know how it goes.

Bottom line: tape will continue to exist for years yet. It won’t all die in one day, but rather slowly fade over the next decade.

[Todd Terry]

[Mark Suszko] “We still acquire on tape, in DVCProSD and HD.”

We did too until just a few weeks ago, when we started shooting with the C300PL. Tapless and and LOVING IT!. If I never have to capture anything from tape again, it will be too soon. I think my senior editor feels even more strongly about that than I do. Of course I might change my attitude the first time an important file goes corrupt.

[Mark Suszko] “…we still get requests for Betacam dubs.”

Hey Mark, make you a sweet deal on a few cases of Beta stock 🙂

T2

__________________________________
Todd Terry
Creative Director
Fantastic Plastic Entertainment, Inc.
fantasticplastic.com

[Mark Suszko]

Todd, you know the joke about the accordianist that remembered too late he’s left his instrument visible on the front seat of his parked car?

Its like that with your tapes:-)

No thanks- we’re good.

[Steve Eisen]

Have not used tape in a year. That was to make a Beta SP dub of a VNR.
For broadcast, I export to KiPro. Most OB trucks are using more and more of them.
I still have 2-3/4″ and 3-Beta SP decks. I got rid of my DSR-11 four years ago when I started shooting P2.

Steve Eisen
Eisen Video Productions
Vice President
Chicago Creative Pro Users Group

[Mark Raudonis]

Every network that we deliver to STILL expects a videoTAPE master. Usually HDCAMsr or HDCAM. Some (up until last year) still wanted an SD Betacam copy.

I will also add: Every network that we deliver to now accepts a DIGITAL file but they haven’t eliminated the tape requirement. So there we are. Stuck in the middle with a tape requirement AND a digital file requirement. Can’t quite get rid of the tape machines… but they’re getting less and less use as time moves on.

I call our machine room the museum of ancient tape formats.

Mark

[Scott Sheriff]

[Mark Raudonis] “I call our machine room the museum of ancient tape formats.”

At the rate and direction the industry is going, they’ll be calling the edit bay, or perhaps production companies something similar next year.

Scott Sheriff
SST Digital Media
Multi-Camera Director, VFX and Post Production

The Affordable Camera Dolly is your just right solution!

“If you think it’s expensive to hire a professional to do the job, wait until you hire an amateur.” —Red Adair

[Mark Suszko]

My intro to our tape/machine room:

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=PPoYzyOn44M

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