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DVX2000 and a DVCProHD tape drive
In the warm glow of the impending announcement it doesn’t seem the P2 fans are too concerned about the lack of a solution for medium and long term archival storage. Outside of filling a shelf full of hard drives or copying to DVDHD (Blue ray, eh?) there doesn’t seem to be anything suggested. This may not concern shooters too much but those of us who also wear producer’s hats need to keep our material around for a few years if not for posterity.
Well how about a nice cheap firwire or USB DVCProHD tape drive that would have straight copy functions. Plug it into a laptop and copy away – even shooting long form documentary out in the field. Jan?
Otherwise this nice format would seem to relegated to ENG use and that would be a pity.
David
AllinOneFilms.com -
16 Replies
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A DVCproHD tape drive, even cut down to just those features would be quite expensive, probably not much less than the $20,000 of the DVCproHD AJ1200A.
Personally, I think Sony have it all wrong with XDCAM. Those discs are practically perfect for longer term storage, not for aquisition. Failing that, we’ll have writable blu-ray very soon, and that should take care of most of our needs.
Graeme
– http://www.nattress.com – Film Effects for FCP
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seems to me that if you store to tape as DATA not a play back type file where you need a full video deck that should cut the price far below the AJ1200a. you are looking for STORAGE not a deck.
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Well, that’s a DLT drive then, isn’t it? An automated P2 to DLT would be nice, but it would be probably cheaper to make one yourself with an old PC.
Graeme
– http://www.nattress.com – Film Effects for FCP
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[Graeme Nattress] “A DVCproHD tape drive, even cut down to just those features would be quite expensive, probably not much less than the $20,000 of the DVCproHD AJ1200A. “
I doubt it would need to be that expensive. It wouldn’t require much in the way of support circuitry and all the R&D has already been done on the drive mechanism.
[Graeme Nattress] “Personally, I think Sony have it all wrong with XDCAM. Those discs are practically perfect for longer term storage, not for aquisition. Failing that, we’ll have writable blu-ray very soon, and that should take care of most of our needs.”
I don’t think most producer types will be happy archiving by transcoding to mpeg2. Far more confortable staying in the native compression codec.
David
AllinOneFilms.com -
Archiving to optical disk does not imply converting to MPEG2. When I archive my program code to DVDs, I don’t turn my program code into MPEG2 🙂 You’re just going to be using them as a data device, not a video device, just like the other suggestion to use DLT or something like it.
Graeme
– http://www.nattress.com – Film Effects for FCP
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[David Cherniack] “I don’t think most producer types will be happy archiving by transcoding to mpeg2. Far more confortable staying in the native compression codec. “
David,
I think Graeme went that we could backup the native DVCProHD files to BluRay discs as data. Seeing as they hold over 20GB per disc, it could be pretty handy.
There would be no reason to transcode.
Luis Caffesse
Studio 3 Productions, Inc.
Austin, Texas -
[Luis Caffesse] ” think Graeme went that we could backup the native DVCProHD files to BluRay discs as data.”
As Graeme points you’re correct and I should have interpreted his comment that way.
But how far away are blu-ray drives at reasonable prices?
David
AllinOneFilms.com -
[David Cherniack] “As Graeme points you’re correct
Yeah, he beat me to the punch.
I guess he posted while I was typing.He’s quick on the draw.
But how far away are blu-ray drives at reasonable prices? “
I think, much like the discussion about P2 cards, we’ll see the price of these drop quickly once the demand and availability it there.
Just like DVD-R drives were $5000 when first released, and we can now get one for under $200. It’s just a matter of time, and things are moving rather quickly.
Luis Caffesse
Studio 3 Productions, Inc.
Austin, Texas -
But how far away are blu-ray drives at reasonable prices?
What is a reasonable price ?
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David,
[David Cherniack] “Well how about a nice cheap firwire or USB DVCProHD tape drive that would have straight copy functions. Plug it into a laptop and copy away – even shooting long form documentary out in the field. Jan?”
Goldangit, don’t you ever read what I write. (David & I are old friends, so don’t anyone think that I’m being overly harsh.) The answer is just a few months away and it’s not just for P2 but for everyone who needs to archive loads of media up to 50 years:
200 GB, 20MBps (the speed of a slow hard drive), WORM technology (Write Once, Read Many) on a cartridge the size of a thick floppy disk that costs $50 (25 cents/GB) initially. I have no idea what the drive itself will cost initially, but depending on how it’s licensed over time, the drive and media costs can only go down, perhaps precipitously. This leaves BlueRay and H-DVD sitting on the starting line as an archival medium (not as a distribution medium.)
Ron Shook
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