Backup P2 to tape

[Barry Green]

Well, there’s video tape and then there’s data tape. Do you need specifically one or the other?

For video tape, DVCPRO-HD tape is what you’d want, and you can get a firewire-enabled deck that will let you stream the video straight from the camera to the deck, or from a computer to the deck. Figure $25,000 and up.

For data tape, any kind of data tape would work, such as DLT, LTO, SAIT, etc. Anything that’s used for backing up computer data would work, losslessly. Data tape drives are a lot less expensive, maybe $1500 to $5,000 or so.

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[Ron Shook]

Barry,

[Barry Green] “For data tape, any kind of data tape would work, such as DLT, LTO, SAIT, etc. Anything that’s used for backing up computer data would work, losslessly. Data tape drives are a lot less expensive, maybe $1500 to $5,000 or so.”

I just happened to be researching that today and found in my initial search that LTO2 or LTO3 is by a good margin the most cost effective per speed and capacity, and far as I could find that Dell was the best source for these. They have a $1700 “PowerVault 110T LTO-2-L” drive with 200GB native capacity, $50/tape, and 86 GB/hr. speed, so it would take a little more than real time to backup DVCProHD at 25 cents/GB. They also have an LTO3 drive at $3700, 400GB native capacity, $110/tape, and much faster at 288GB/hr., so backup would go at almost 3x real-time for HD at slightly increased tape cost.

Something to smoke in your pipes.

Ron Shook

[Barry Green]

Yeah, and data tape backup is vastly superior than video tape backup for many reasons — not the least of which is that you get to preserve the metadata and the clip-based individual-file nature of your projects, and it’s 3x faster. And the decks are so much cheaper, and the tape is cheaper per gig too.

But it’s not video tape. If someone absolutely positively needs a tape that they can play in a video tape deck and watch video footage from, then the DVCPRO-HD tape deck is the best way to go for that, since it will preserve the data 100%. It’s a digital transfer from the computer to the deck.

But data tape is the far superior solution for all other purposes.

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[Dhffhd]

Im not familiar with data tape, how would you utilize backups on data tape, ie, would you fire wire it into your NLE, or what?

[Barry Green]

It’s a different workflow so you have to disassociate yourself from the whole concept of “video tape.”

A P2 card is, for all intents and purposes, a hard disk. It’s not a videotape kind of thing. You don’t “capture” video from the P2 card, it’s already captured and digitized. The data on a P2 card is what you’d expect to have after capturing a video tape, if you see what I mean.

So at that point, it’s all data on a hard disk. How do you back up hard disks? Typically with data tape. DLT, or LTO, or SAIT, or the old Travan, or Exabyte, etc. Data tape is the mainstay of archiving mass quantities of data worldwide. Data tape is what’s used to archive bank records and all sorts of things. Well, P2 data is just a bunch of computer files, just like spreadsheets or databases or word processing documents. So you can back all that up to data tape, just like you would any other computer data.

And backing up to data tape has significant, tremendous advantages — it can be 3x faster than writing to video tape, it’s bit-for-bit accurate, and it preserves your project exactly as you had it when you last used it. You can restore your project completely and go back to work at any time, whereas if you back up to video tape, you’d have to then re-capture all your footage. And backing up to data tape preserves all the metadata, whereas going to video tape discards all the metadata.

And, finally, data tape drives are vastly less expensive than video tape decks. A DVCPRO-HD video deck with firewire input will be around $25,000; you can get a pretty killer data drive for under $5,000 and some decent choices under $2,000. And data tape is less expensive per gigabyte than video tape too.

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Get the most from your DVX camera. The DVX Book and DVX DVD are now available on ebay and at Amazon (https://www.fiftv.com/db)