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Help needed in transition to HD !
We produce 45 episodes of a show that needs to be delivered on 1080i 59.94 HDCAM. We are currently an SD tape operation but need to move up. Because of the amount of video we gather, archive and use on a regular basis, I would like to acquire and edit at a lower frame size and convert up via the aja as we lay back to tape. I have a chart that shows me about every HD format and how many TB’s will store how many hours, but it doesn’t include XDCAM from the EX. I know it records in a variety of frame sizes and rates, but does anyone have a chart that shows me storage scenarios ? The other question I posted on the DVCpro area was… has anyone shot at a smaller than 1080 frame size and up converted to HDcam 1080i 59.94, if so, how did your image look. (assume there is a decent DP etc etc) What I am hoping to do is shoot a native image that holds up during the conversion but gets me a lot of hours on whatever storage device we choose. Thanks for the help
Dave
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5 Replies
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I would forget the SD up conversion and tape storage if you are really going to HD.
Sony XD Cam HD and EX codecs are extremely storage efficient and are both offer full raster 1920×1080 native HD Broadcast resolution sensors. I am a DP for an Animal Planet series and in the first season I choose the DVC Pro HD codec and we had to cross convert up to 1080 and some said the image didn’t look right during the broadcasts. Last season I had the production change over to the Sony XD Cam EX3 cameras and we had no complaints and the image quality was excellent. We did record directly to Mac Pro’s capturing as Pro Rez for 90% of the show, however we did backup with native EX files that looked just as good. I believe you will need to purchase 2-16 drive, raid 5 storage racks and network them to the edit bays over gigabit ethernet and purchase an LTO-4 to archive all the data for a fail safe backup. Welcome to the tapeless HD world. Once you change over I believe you will love it.
Good Luck
Michael Palmer -
Isn’t LTO 4 a tape cartridge?
Bob
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Yep, an archive only tape system, not something you can access to quickly. We are all waiting for SONY to offer up an optical archive solution. Hopefully this summer.
Good Luck
Michael Palmer -
Thanks for the advice. We will dump SD next year and never mix it into the new series (assuming I can get my head around this tapeless deal)
I love the idea of recording the Prores 1080i possibly on the new JVC cause its ready to edit in FCP, but the storage chart indicates you get about 15 hours of storage per 1T. We already own a SAN and 12tb raid 5 to edit in our current SD configuration, which is expandable by adding more raids. We will shoot, and archive about 150 hours per season, and a adding a 16tb raid is about 9k. This means we’d probably get enough archive storage for a season on that drive, but it also means 9k every year for every season, and then we max out the san at some point. You mention you saved xdhd files, any idea how much hours of material you can get on 1tb at 1080i 60fps ? Is there considerable space savings over prores ?
LTO4 sounds nice and very safe but 300gb per cartridges are perhaps a little small in capacity, but love the price per tape after the initial investment, but would love to hear how this format fits into your workflow.
My other thought is using the drobo as an archive since I can get about 3.5 TB of protected storage, from 4x 1 tb drives, pull them out from the drobo enclosure when they are all full, put them on a shelf as a bundle, then put them all back in the drobo when I need something stored on them. Drobo tech support said there is no rebuild time after re-insertion, you still have the raid protection, but access is instant. I’d hang this onto our san via the server computer and FW800 port. Its only an archive system like the LTO, I don’t expect to edit from it.
This seems pretty scalable, since I can just keep buying HD’s, if one or even two fail on the shelf, they can be rebuilt. I was thinking of adding another 16tb, that we would transfer only material we need from the drobo, edit the show packages (we are essentially a news style show), media manage them, then pass those along to our 12tb drive, which is where we string the packages together with anchor lead ins, graphics etc, and finish the show. We keep media managed packages on the 16tb drive, but wipe it clean of the raw material we brought in from the drobo.
On the 12tb we eventually media manage the show, keep it on the 12tb drive for use at anytime, and archive the media managed show back to fresh drives in the drobo, then when they are full, we send those offsite for disaster recovery (can you tell I am worried about losing material!) Go ahead, tell me I am crazy, I’m expecting it, cause there has to be a better way, I’m just not smart enough to know what it is !
Dave
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Not sure 300 gigs is the max, can’t wrap my head around it at the moment but it is a solid solution for archiving data. If you are depending on hard drive for your “disaster recovery” system then you should have a second hard drive with the same backup on it in another place as hard drives are cheap.
“I love the idea of recording the Prores 1080i possibly on the new JVC cause its ready to edit in FCP”
The new JVC cameras DO NOT record in the Apple Pro Rez codec. They DO have a Quicktime .MOV wrappers so you don’t need to re-wrap the Native XD Cam files before editing with FCS2. These are nice cameras but they are NOT IMO as good as the Sony XD Cam EX series cameras due to the smaller 1/3 inch sensors.Before you purchase anymore storage drives I would like you to visit https://www.maxupgrades.com and call Syed the owner and consult with him for your next storage solution. Syed has been suppling me and my productions with proven affordable storage systems for the last 4 years and they (knock on wood) haven’t failed to date.
I’m not sure about the Drobo system but any good raid 5 solution will have plenty of redundancy and will rebuild a replacement drive should one fail.
Good Luck
Michael Palmer
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