General Back up & Archive Forum

[John Heagy]

[Michael Aranyshev] “Where is an app that would take an EDL and retrieve exactly the frames used in this EDL from a library of LTO tapes?”

Not very familiar with DPX workflows but with DPX a good MAM(Media Asset Manager) is essential, and expensive, and i’d imagine it would have an archive function to handle restores. Short of that all you’d have to determine which files to restore “manually”.

DPX is the defintion of fine granularity so you can restore down to the frame level. If you want to restore part of a QT or MXF file then you’d need “partial file restore”. StorNext offers this as well as Cache-A with mxf (look for “mxf aware”). I heard Atempo was working on this a s well. We handle the granularity issue by “chopping up” large files so we don’t need to restore a 1hr file for a 5 sec shot.

John Heagy

[Bj Ahlen]

As a producer and editor looking at a scary amount of hard drives used for media backup, I’m now forced to get up to date on the various data tape technologies.

I’m hoping that the 1.6 TB (native) LTO-5 drives will be here soon with full reliability and true backwards R/W compatibility with LTO-4, but there is so much going on in this field, it is scary.

Like John, I think that a dedicated Backup and Archive forum would generate quite substantial interest and traffic, as well as additional sponsors.

There is a lot to talk about, from different types of drives and interfaces, different kinds of software support, autoloaders, etc., etc.

I’ll be happy to share the best ways to handle off site media backup, as well as what I have learned from 7 years of using multi-generational online backup for non-media project files.

[Yannick Guillerm]

Hi John,

Just came through your post today. You mentioned several things about DPX management and partial restore. Atempo ADA 3.1 (soon 3.2) handles archiving of DPX files. It can read the DPX file header to read its metadata and store it in the ADA database. It then becomes searchable in the ADA GUI. You can search on DPX files with a specific frame rate for example.
ADA 3.1 also offers native partial restore of MXF files.

Don’t hesitate to contact us if you’d like more information.

Yannick Guillerm
Atempo Inc
yannick.guillerm@atempo.com

PS: I’m also in favor of a new “ARCHIVE, BACKUP and ASSET MANAGEMENT” forum on Creative Cow 🙂