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Archiving EX footage to XDCAM disks
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[Mark Raudonis] “Geez Craig, I think you’re a “glass is half empty” kind of guy! “
It depends on who previously drank out of the glass and what happened to them. I was senior engineer at a facility that bought close to 200 BetaSX machines. Not my decision of course. Zip drives were once so popular that they were standard in many computers, even Macs.
Beta, BetaSP, DigiBeta has had a very long life. I do not see any evidence as the codec and media fields broaden immensely, that XDCAM will have the same longevity as Beta. I see MPEG-2 (which is one common thing on XDCAM discs) living a long time even after it’s supplanted by other codecs. The ability to read old codecs will endure IMHO. Media is changing fast and solid state will become the norm and I can see Sony toying with this as well. When it comes to media I think ubiquity beats priority over time especially when the ubiquity means easier storage and retrieval. It’ll take 3-5 years (at most IMHO).
To put it another way, codecs will change but older widely used codecs will be retrievable for a very long time. Media will change but unless the media is/was ubiquitous, readers will become scarce due to manufacturing and hardware maintenance issues. When I mean ubiquitous I mean massively so and if it’s “consumer” as well as “professional” the better, CD, DVD for example. SDHC is heading in that direction as well.
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All this makes me feel that the very best archival medium is the one that endured for 100 years – FILM.
Michael Slowe
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Film didn’t endure too well either. Many films decayed and are gone forever. Others cost a fortune to be painstakingly restored. Of course in almost all these cases we have only the masters (the Final Cut) and none of the source material, the “out takes” as it were.
As a Marx Brothers fan this breaks my heart
The Marx Brothers
Humor Risk (1921)
https://www.marx-brothers.org/watching/film/Humor_Risk.htmand this
The House That Shadows Built
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_House_That_Shadows_Built
which exist but is in poor conditionAlso they did a radio series (not film obviously)
Flywheel, Shyster and Flywheel in which all the recordings were lost but the scripts found in the 1980s -
Hate to think of the workflow from BPAV to film for all my raw footage.
Marvin Holdman
Production Manager
Tourist Network
8317 Front Beach Rd, Suite 23
Panama City Beach, Fl
phone 850-234-2773 ext. 128
cell 850-585-9667
skype username – vidmarv -
No Marvin, I referred to acquisition in film, I take your point about archiving digital material. Craig, not sure that properly cared for film hasn’t lasted. Obviously the old flammable nitrate stock had to be rescued and transferred and some of the early colour neg suffered (particularly ‘Seven Brides For Seven Brothers’) but generally stuff seems OK and it can all still be played and will be for many, many years yet. Nothing very mysterious about the playing – shine a light through it and keep it moving!
Michael Slowe
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Filem decays in many ways. Even newer films. That’s why you see restoration of films even from the 1980s. It’s part of the chemical process (chemicals used at the time).
The “modern” archival is that data itself can be preserved even though media has a “life span” The idea is that you should be able to copy 10 year old data or 100 year old data (depends on the media used at the time) and the data remains true. It’s not restoration but simply moving to a “more modern” (reliable, longer lasting) media. Even data can have issues and that’s why things such as error correction are important. Whether LTO, Optical Disc, Solid State, there’s a chemical (and sometimes physical depending…) process of decay. There’s no “forever” yet that I know of and even longevity testing theories and measurements can be hotly debated.
The reason why I think Solid State will be the next winner (and who knows about some yet unknown successor) is not only what’s being worked on around the media (see WORM mentioned previously) but that I personally believe PLAYERS will be around with backwards compatibility for a LONG TIME. That’s because such devices are cost effective (inexpensive) to keep manufacturing.
Tape players are toughest to keep going given parts and age and decline as new players types replaced older ones. Optical Disk (and I mean CD and DVD, not XDCAM) are wide used in “consumer” as well as professional gear and even today’s Blu-ray player and handle DVDs and CDs from the past. I do see Blu-ray as the beginning of the decline because, while third party devices are common, they are not generally built into computers as data storage/retrieval devices. And they are a “mechanism” device which can have failure over time (lasers age and fail).
With solid state certainly contacts can fail and chemicals age too but I think they have a potential for much longer life especially once “archived” they frequency of use drops and aging can be slowed. retrieval devices are wide spread and computer makers often build them in to computers and I think that’s on the upswing as it seems every consumer recording device seems to have SD and now SDHC. It takes almost nothing to add support for the oodles of other types like CF or microSD or what have you. If 50 years from now, it’ll cost pennies to add old formats to what ever new fangled Solid State card format of the day, then manufactures will probably do it. In other words that reader will handle the “GoogolplexSplotchHD” card they’ll probably throw in an SDHC slot in it’s 1000 card format reader.
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Absolutely right Craig, I was being a bit provocative referring to film, it’s just that I have nostalgic feelings for it being very old!
Solid state is now with us and will be refined again and again and your suggestion that there will be ways of accessing data from these cards with computer software of various sorts for many years to come seems sensible.
Michael Slowe
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Tim et. al.,
I am a user of BOTH XDCam HD (optical) and XDCam EX (SxS flash card). I must say that the XDCam optical format is extremely robust. I’ve found myself wearing more “cargo” pants these days, because it’s easy to carry a spare disc when I work in the field. I’ve accidentally WASHED a disc or two and didn’t lose a single sector of data! You can’t say that with tape!
I live in Arizona, and it can reach temperatures of well over 150 degrees in vehicles. The discs have never had an issue with heat either. They take a licking and keep on ticking, to borrow a phrase.
In 2006, I was able to receive a pre-release version of the EX1, original model camera. I began using it frequently as a second camera for our XDCam HD (optical) clients. The question became “how do we provide the media to our clients?” The answer became clear, when some of our clients DEMANDED that all of the files be identical. We started using Clip Browser and the Main Concept codec package to transcode all of our files from MP4 to MXF. I would then use an F70 deck or a PDW-U1 drive, the latter being faster, to copy the files onto an optical disc. Further, we backed up the source footage onto external HDD’s. This in reality created FOUR copies of the media DL DVD, 2x HDD, and optical disc. (We’ve had a few issues throughout the years with HDD’s, so I didn’t particularly care for that method. Thus, we backed up to TWO HDD’s and DL DVD. It wasn’t pretty, but it worked.)
In the last 24-18 months, we’ve began to use the Convergent Design nanoFlash as a secondary recording for ALL of our shoots, with EVERY camera we shoot. Our F800 has a nanoFlash, so does our F350 and EX1. With the advent of the “User Data” folder, we began storing ORIGINAL files in that space from both EX cameras and the nF. This has worked out extremely well. Typically, we STILL convert the files for our clients into the MXF wrapper, and write those to optical disc too… but we will keep the “originals” on optical disc for archive purposes. In effect, this creates MULTIPLE COPIES of the source material, albeit in different states, both file type and frame size; Optical disc transcodes, Optical disc originals, and HDD (typically at client request).
No one has a crystal ball… therefore it is hard to “estimate” what will and will not be around years from today. If one really needs to make a 3/4″ or MII dub, or utilize source footage there ARE decks out there to do it.
As previously stated in this thread… films are being restored from the 80’s. Remember, 3/4″ and beta became prominent in that time frame. I don’t know if ANY format is fool proof for the extreme long haul. All one can do is protect themselves for the daily work pitfalls. Hopefully that will carry you through for the next 10 years or so. I’m four years into all of the XD formats and going very strong. I haven’t lost a single clip of either type since we started in 2006. I had tapes that broke, stretched, etc. in shorter time frames.
I’m convinced that the XDCam HD and EX systems and formats are robust and here for a while. Sony is committed to both formats. These have proven to be more stable, and secure with a more rapid turn around time than any format we’ve used in the past.
As for tape, I don’t think most XDCam HD or XDCam EX users or clients are WILLING to spend the necessary funds to PURCHASE an HDCam SR deck. Further, the media is still quite expensive. These are some of the reasons that Sony created the optical and flash workflows.
The optical media prices will drop, as the discs are becoming more widely accepted for other uses. Many “other” industries/users have become familiar with the relatively inexpensive PDW-U1 drive and are utilizing it for non-traditional uses. These include P2 users, Red users, nanoFlash users, still photographers, and medical / legal offices. Due to the rigidity of the “cartridge” in which the disc is housed, many industries have began a transition into using XDCam optical discs for their long-term data storage needs. The footprint is small and they are reliable.
I suggest you examine your own personal needs, listen to the experiences of others and decide what works within your own facility.
Curt
Curt Pair
Picture This Productions
Sony ICE Team
F900/F800/F350/PDW700/EX1/EX3/D790/D600
Adobe Premiere Pro CS3 HD/Matrox
Phoenix, AZ
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