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Creating a searchable digital library
I have a few hundred Beta tapes that i have been asked to both put them in an archive quality format, as well as create a digital archive for that other people could access fairly easily.
right now i have most of them digitized into ProRes 422 from a former project. they are approximately 12 to 14 GB a piece. would it be worth redigitizing them into a different format?
I was wondering where a good place to start looking for a long term storage solution for these would be. any help would be greatly appreciated.
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3 Replies
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step 1. Buy a Mac Pro and a big mama disk drive array (48 TB) and some capture card (AJA, Blackmagic, Matrox). Digitize your video on this big drive array.
step 2. Buy Cat DV Pro. This is an asset managment software program that will let you catalog your media now living on your big mama
drive array. CatDV Pro is $340, and you can do a free download to try it out.step 3. Buy a Cache-A Prime, so that you can create LTO tapes to archive your critical information, so that when the big mama drive array fails 4 years from now, you can restore your data.
Easy, right ?
Bob Zelin
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Nicholas,
There are a number of high capacity disk storage solutions out there and most of them – either SAS or Fibre Channel – can give you the capacity and performance that you need for such a project. The most important aspect of this is to not use consumer grade disks. We use and recommend the Seagate Constellation ES.2 3.5″ or Constellation.2 2.5″ drives for performance and long life. Using your existing ProRes 422 ingests will make for a good starting point.
The next step is where you will either succeed or fail in the long run – your DAM should offload as much of the management as possible once the data is put into the system.
My recommendation would be a combination of CatDV from SquareBox with their Enterprise server, one or two Worker Nodes and their web interface solution, This way, you can use your existing PR 422 media as your baseline and then transcode to other necessary formats using the CatDV Worker Nodes automatically. The web interface then would allow you to share the assets in a secure manner over the web.
For longer term archival, I would suggest an LTO-5 based solution. You can add the DAX FFA archival solution to the CatDV backend and BRU Server to archive the media to tape using a standalone drive or a silo-sized tape library system. For your capacity point, a 24 slot library with 1 or 2 LTO-5 drives will provide both the performance and capacity (36TB of uncompressed data in a single load out) at a very price competitive point.
HTH,
Tim
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Tim Jones
CTO – TOLIS Group, Inc.
https://www.productionbackup.com
BRU … because it’s the RESTORE that matters! -
thank you very much or the advice, I have used catdv, which is a very nice program and was looking into the LTO-5 drives. I’ll start doing a bit more research now based on your advice. once again thanks both of you for your response.
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