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Going Tapeless???
We are starting do some serious thinking about going tapless here.
From what I can see there ar e2 main options Panasonic P2 or Sony XD Cam.
Is this correct or are there other?
Is there anything that will give us a final mov file that we can just drag onto our server and start working with or does everything have to be imported and converted to mov.
Thanks for the help.
Steve Cohen
Senior Editor
O2 Media Inc. -
14 Replies
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[Steve Cohen] “s this correct or are there other?”
There are others. RED, AVCHD, H.264 from Canon 5D Mark II…JVC’s format that records QT directly…
[Steve Cohen] “Is there anything that will give us a final mov file that we can just drag onto our server and start working with or does everything have to be imported and converted to mov. “
By “final .mov file” you are talking conversion. P2 records at MXF, and XDCAM EX records to BPAV, or MP4…whatever their format is. And if you want an .mov, that means that you will be converting. BUT, only converting to QT. DVCPRO HD, EXCAM EX, AVCIntra…those can be converted to QT in their native formats, no transcoding to another format. Although it is best to convert AVCIntra and AVCHD to ProREs when you import.
And there is software from third parties to allow editing of the tapeless formats in their native format. Like MXF4Mac and Calibrated and Raylight for P2, similar for XDCAM. But you have to have those installed on EACH machine…separate licenses.
Shane
GETTING ORGANIZED WITH FINAL CUT PRO DVD…don’t miss it.
Read my blog, Little Frog in High Def -
And don’t forget the KiPro which records to ProRes or HQ with whatever camera you have now.
Jeremy
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Yes, someone told us about the Ki Pro and that is a very viable option, but it is also another piece of equipment to purchase and to cover our studio shoots and field shots we are looking at needing 7 or 8 of them so it gets pretty pricey quick.
Thanks I’m looking over the other responses, but any other info would be appreciated.
Steve Cohen
Senior Editor
O2 Media Inc. -
[Steve Cohen] “but it is also another piece of equipment to purchase and to cover our studio shoots and field shots we are looking at needing 7 or 8 of them so it gets pretty pricey quick. “
So will a whole new tapeless environment, with even more pieces of equipment. the KiPro will allow you to spend 4K on each camera and then be done with it. Tapeless will be 15-100K per camera when you’re done with it, then you have to look at the studio infra structure in terms of archive, post, and edit.
Let me ask you, what are you looking to get out of going tapeless?
What kind of shoots and situations do you need to cover?
What formats are you working in now?
Jeremy
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We have made the leap to go tapeless, and we went with Sony PMW-EX1’s for the cameras, so we record to XDCAM, and yes, we have to “Log & Transfer” but since it’s not transcoding the footage, just creating the QT container, it’s been quite smooth.
The sweet thing about the EX1’s is that Log & Transfer is both quick and clean, and the final file you can just drop in your timeline and go. However, be sure to change your render type to ProRes422 HQ as the GOP(?) of XDCAM is really long, so when you make any edit, you have to re-render huge swaths of video. That was an annoyance that I didn’t know of up front, but thankfully, you can set that once and forget it in FCP7.
We do a couple of things that are probably not a concern for you, as we are a very small shop (4 people). We capture to a fully-racked Drobopro, which has eight 2 TB drives in it, for a functional protected space of 14.55 TB, and that is backed up to a second Drobopro of the same size just in case. And we have every capture we make burned to DVD and stored off-site, also just in case.
That’s how we’re going tapeless. And right now we’re doing the last bit of the project and creating a digital archive of our thousands of tapes. I’m thinking that we’ll have to reduce the files down to something small, but I haven’t decided on what yet. Photo-JPEG for video and then just store the audio as an MP3? Maybe, but I’m still working on that one.
kev~!
Kevin Hamm
Video, Web, Print and coloring books. -
[Jeremy Garchow] “So will a whole new tapeless environment, with even more pieces of equipment. the KiPro will allow you to spend 4K on each camera and then be done with it. Tapeless will be 15-100K per camera when you’re done with it, then you have to look at the studio infra structure in terms of archive, post, and edit.
We are looking at new cameras also, we currently shoot with D9 and Beta SP camera that are not capable of HD (Which is also going to be part of this upgrade, I don’t think I mentioned that). So we already have the incurred cost of cameras.
[Jeremy Garchow] Let me ask you, what are you looking to get out of going tapeless?
Well my boss is looking to eliminate the cost of tapes, but I keep trying to get across to her the when you remove the tape you have an added expense of Solid State Media or Hard drives to record to and something to archive to (DLT tape or something Not sure which way are going with that right now.)
Her boss and the owner of the company is looking to have the latest and greatest buzz words in house.
I’m looking to reduce archival tape storage since we have limited space.
[Jeremy Garchow] What kind of shoots and situations do you need to cover?
We do 2 shows 1 is 95% studio shoot and the other is 95% field shoot.
They are 30 min “educational” show, but realistically they are soft sell advertising, nothing real fancy or complicated.The one that is mainly studio we are going to try to get to a point where we can do “live to tape” with just cleanup post.
[Jeremy Garchow] What formats are you working in now?”
Beta SP, D9 and Mini DV all shot SD and digitized component or SDI depending on what deck is available.
We are trying to clean things up and get all the deck uniform.
Some are don’t have SDI outputs, some do, some have 4 channel audio most don’t.It is just a hodge podge of stuff here tight now and we are trying to make it a little more professional.
Steve Cohen
Senior Editor
O2 Media Inc. -
OK, Steve. You have many considerations to take. There’s a ton of really good reasons to go tapeless, in my opinion the cost of tape is not one of them.
[Steve Cohen] “(Which is also going to be part of this upgrade, I don’t think I mentioned that)”
SO you are planning to switch outright from SD to HD? Or is there going to be some grey area of some SD and some HD?
[Steve Cohen] ”
Well my boss is looking to eliminate the cost of tapes, but I keep trying to get across to her the when you remove the tape you have an added expense of Solid State Media or Hard drives to record to and something to archive to (DLT tape or something Not sure which way are going with that right now.) “Astute observations and you are totally correct. The good thing about this is that an archive solution might cost you a bit up front, but the cost of the devices and storage gets cheaper with time. I am evaluating a Cache-A LTO4 system in our offices right now. So far so good, although it’s a bit ironic that we jumped in to tapeless with both feet, and now everything ends up back on tape. But it’s a different kind of tape and is still much much faster and more feature rich than video tape (can’t archive an FCP project on Digibeta). While the upfront cost of the actual hardware is an expense venture, the cost of the LTO tapes are cheaper than hard drives, and more robust. I wanted to wait for a solid state situation, but with over 40TBs of material to archive, we couldn’t wait that long and needed to jump in to something right now. I will have a review up in the cow sometime in the future about it.
The nice thing about tapeless is that it shifts the archiving (usually the slowest part of the production process) to the end of the production. This means that with tapeless media and fast access to it, you are editing and in the creative cut faster than you can say Log and Capture.
[Steve Cohen] “Her boss and the owner of the company is looking to have the latest and greatest buzz words in house. “
OK, for your bosses this is a selling point to get more business and tell potenetial clients that you are technologically keeping up with the times. That’s valid, but you as the user, must be cautious of this line of thining because if you choose the wrong format (for whatever reason, cost probably being a major motivating factor), it will be you that has to deal with the problems. For the amount of work and material it sounds like you create, I highly highly recommend standardizing on an i-frame capable codec. This means leave out the Long GOP formats (XDCam, HDV, etc) and stick with AVC-I or DVCPro HD. The Panasonic implementation of the MXF standard is extremely robust and flexible. The codecs they have are extremely nice for broadcast, and the system just works. Now, I will probably get some blow back for this because there are plenty of people who use and love XDCam, but in my experience, the Long GOP situation is not good, especially when used to dealing with i-frame codecs my whole digital life. In your studio shoots, I imagine that you do a lot of multi-cam edits?
[Steve Cohen] “We are trying to clean things up and get all the deck uniform. “
Meaning what? A standard connection or patch panel?
[Steve Cohen] “t is just a hodge podge of stuff here tight now and we are trying to make it a little more professional. “
Yes, if you are looking to switch to a new format, now is the time to set aside the old, and organize the new.
Jeremy
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[Jeremy Garchow] “OK, Steve. You have many considerations to take. There’s a ton of really good reasons to go tapeless, in my opinion the cost of tape is not one of them.
[Steve Cohen] “(Which is also going to be part of this upgrade, I don’t think I mentioned that)”
[Jeremy Garchow] SO you are planning to switch outright from SD to HD? Or is there going to be some grey area of some SD and some HD?
The switch from SD to HD will be all at once, but it may not happen at the same time we go tapeless, if that makes sense. Some the distirubtion channels that we deal with are not ready for HD, so we will probably record and edit in HD and then down convert to SD when shipping it out.
[Steve Cohen] ”
Well my boss is looking to eliminate the cost of tapes, but I keep trying to get across to her the when you remove the tape you have an added expense of Solid State Media or Hard drives to record to and something to archive to (DLT tape or something Not sure which way are going with that right now.) ”[Jeremy Garchow] Astute observations and you are totally correct. The good thing about this is that an archive solution might cost you a bit up front, but the cost of the devices and storage gets cheaper with time. I am evaluating a Cache-A LTO4 system in our offices right now. So far so good, although it’s a bit ironic that we jumped in to tapeless with both feet, and now everything ends up back on tape. But it’s a different kind of tape and is still much much faster and more feature rich than video tape (can’t archive an FCP project on Digibeta). While the upfront cost of the actual hardware is an expense venture, the cost of the LTO tapes are cheaper than hard drives, and more robust. I wanted to wait for a solid state situation, but with over 40TBs of material to archive, we couldn’t wait that long and needed to jump in to something right now. I will have a review up in the cow sometime in the future about it.
The nice thing about tapeless is that it shifts the archiving (usually the slowest part of the production process) to the end of the production. This means that with tapeless media and fast access to it, you are editing and in the creative cut faster than you can say Log and Capture.
Ture and with the right DLT system it can be automated to do it over night and not take up precious editor time.
[Steve Cohen] “Her boss and the owner of the company is looking to have the latest and greatest buzz words in house. ”[Jeremy Garchow] OK, for your bosses this is a selling point to get more business and tell potenetial clients that you are technologically keeping up with the times. That’s valid, but you as the user, must be cautious of this line of thining because if you choose the wrong format (for whatever reason, cost probably being a major motivating factor), it will be you that has to deal with the problems. For the amount of work and material it sounds like you create, I highly highly recommend standardizing on an i-frame capable codec. This means leave out the Long GOP formats (XDCam, HDV, etc) and stick with AVC-I or DVCPro HD. The Panasonic implementation of the MXF standard is extremely robust and flexible. The codecs they have are extremely nice for broadcast, and the system just works. Now, I will probably get some blow back for this because there are plenty of people who use and love XDCam, but in my experience, the Long GOP situation is not good, especially when used to dealing with i-frame codecs my whole digital life. In your studio shoots, I imagine that you do a lot of multi-cam edits?
What do think about the JVC GY-HM700 that Peter pointed out.
It records QT files so there is nothing to import (convert) Final Cut can work with it directly. I’m not a cameraman so that is my weak point.[Steve Cohen] “We are trying to clean things up and get all the deck uniform. ”
[Jeremy Garchow] Meaning what? A standard connection or patch panel?
Mainly meaning having a standard output, Like I said some decks have SDI output and some don’t, besides D9 is a dinosaur, we can’t even find some one to properly maintain the decks.
[Steve Cohen] “It is just a hodge podge of stuff here tight now and we are trying to make it a little more professional. ”
[Jeremy Garchow] Yes, if you are looking to switch to a new format, now is the time to set aside the old, and organize the new.
Jeremy”
Steve Cohen
Senior Editor
O2 Media Inc. -
[Steve Cohen] “The switch from SD to HD will be all at once, but it may not happen at the same time we go tapeless, if that makes sense. Some the distirubtion channels that we deal with are not ready for HD, so we will probably record and edit in HD and then down convert to SD when shipping it out.
“Well, that’s easy. You just need kona cards in your workstations.
[Steve Cohen] “Ture and with the right DLT system it can be automated to do it over night and not take up precious editor time. “
Yes. The one I have you don’t even have to do overnight. It’s pretty damn simple, and has a built in database.
[Steve Cohen] “What do think about the JVC GY-HM700 that Peter pointed out. “
Long GOP HDV. Quicktime or not…be careful as I mentioned before.
[Steve Cohen] “Mainly meaning having a standard output, Like I said some decks have SDI output and some don’t, besides D9 is a dinosaur, we can’t even find some one to properly maintain the decks. “
That’s easy. You can get small AJA converter boxes that will standardize everything to SDI. That’s what he have here with any/all analog decks. The patch panel is then just SDI (audio/video) and rs-422 for deck control. Simple.
Jeremy
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