I’m excited about P2, or maybe not, yes I am, or I don’t know………

[Brian Deviteri]

I can echo your concerns. I remember when I started shooting digital photography and media cards were SOOO expensive that I was able to get a 16mb and a 32mb one. At the highest resolution I was getting like 8 or 12 pictures a “load” and dumping off to computer often.

Yes, hard drive space is cheaper now, but still, it’s not as cheap or quick in the field as tape. There’s something nice about having a relatively cheap tape on the shelf that you can always go back to for your footage and to archive on. With these P2 cards, how am I supposed to shelf my materials? My external drives are going to run out of space quickly and then what, retire them to the archive? What happens when they won’t spin up 2 or 3 years from now? This whole scenario has me a little concerned and hesitant about the process. At least with the FireStore and similar hard drive recorder attachments I can always have a “tape backup” of the files to go back to if I ever need to. And tape is REALLY cheap compared to a hard drive or multiple flash drives… Anyone have a solution here? Burn each 4gb P2 card to DVD? What about when you have 8gb or 12gb of data to burn? How will that work?

I’m really excited about this announcement, but in practical and cost-effective terms, what does this mean for all of us? Yeah, we all want to adopt an HD/HDV workflow eventually and these “cheaper” cameras can let us do that. I personally am also hesitant about shooting to MPEG-2 and editing that. It’s almost like why not just run your camera into a DVR in the field and then dump that huge hard drive onto an external one before you begin post.

Anyone else have comments or concerns like this?

[Doug Dillaman]

if you really want tape, you can look at DLT-type solutions. Think of your footage as being basically identical to any other form of computer data. Major corporations back up terabytes nightly without breaking a sweat, there’s plenty of vendors of automated backup systems for computer data out there and once they figure out what P2 (et al) means they’ll be repositioning themselves in that market.

Personally, I’m expecting that HD-DVD/Blu-Ray will be the next-generation form of data storage for archival material shot on P2 for indie-level users, although price points on both blank media and burning technology are obviously as yet unknown and recent rumors of a thaw between the two camps implied that said thaw may push implementation of that technology back by as much as two years. Let’s hope that’s not the case.

[Brian Deviteri]

I’ve read that most of us cannot expect to see larger format capacity optical disc drives (ie Blu-Ray or HD-DVD) until 2007. I’d expect the blank media to cost around $5-15 per disc after a year or so of the drives being released since lately I’ve been able to find some DVD+R DL discs for about $6-8 on occasion (if they don’t sell out before I get there). But that’s meaning somewhere in the 2008 ballpark for the majority of us to get a larger format optical disc drive and blank media at an affordable (profitable) level. Can you wait that long? Maybe, but at what price? How many clients will you loose to other vendors?

The DLT tape solution is worth considering, but a company I do work for looked into that awhile back and it was cheaper to just use external hard drives for backup at that time for their purposes. Have the prices come down at all? For my backup right now I always have the miniDV tape on the shelf and the CD-ROM I burn of my project files (without the media) to go back to if I need it. This works for me and I’m sure there are others who do something similar. When I need something beefier, like saving the media files, I’ll burn onto multiple DVDs which is still economical (at times) for DV footage or else I bite the bullet and throw it onto an external hard drive if I know I’ll need it again in the next few months.

What other options are there to save these files from the P2 for archival purposes?

[Luis Caffesse]

[Brian SaenzDeViteri] “I’ve read that most of us cannot expect to see larger format capacity optical disc drives (ie Blu-Ray or HD-DVD) until 2007.”

I was under the impression it would be much sooner than that.
Although personally, considering the amount of coasters I’ve burned in my day, I don’t really feel comfortable backing my data up to any DVD type media.

“What other options are there to save these files from the P2 for archival purposes?”

I personally still feel that backing up the data to external hard drives will probably wind up being the cheapest and most reliable way for the moment. I’m going under the assumption the we’re talking about backing up HD footage here.

A 63 minute DVCProHD tape costs $80 right now (and I doubt that price is going to drop much anytime soon).

63 minutes of DVCProHD at the full 100mb/s equals roughly 47 GB

You can get an external 60GB hard drive for $68 (I just looked one up on pricewatch.com).

So, gig for gig, when it comes to HD footage, hard drives will actually wind up being cheaper than HD tape, and they will only continue to get cheaper (whereas the cost of HD tape will probably stay where it is).

That’s my take on it anyhow.

Luis Caffesse
Studio 3 Productions, Inc.
Austin, Texas

[Doug Dillaman]

My main issue with hard drives as a archive format is that they’re not a long-term archive format, at least not one that I trust. But any backup strategy is a cost vs. risk factor – how much are you willing to spend to backup things? Do you have a redundant set of masters of all those miniDV tapes, so that if your shelf catches fire you have backups of everything else? What’s most promising about P2 is that it becomes a lot easier to make multiple backups. (What scares me is the blase attitude about quick re-use in the field, but that’s probably another thread entirely.)

As far as the HD-DVD question – all valid points, and depending on where I am in the interim I may just be backing up on good old DVD, assuming that the files break down nicely into 4 GB chunks. (I’m curious about the file architecture of P2 storage in general – does anyone have good reading?) More labor intensive, but then you can use all that time you used to spend digitizing.

You’re right that these are tricky questions and expensive ones, and my personal gut is that the price issues of the overall solution will keep P2 out of the picture for a year or two for those without deep pockets, unless they’re shooting relatively small amounts of footage. I mean, if your clients are happy with miniDV today, do they need P2 later this year? If it’s a commercial, maybe. If it’s a live event, doubtful. (Then, there’s the whole post-production question in general, and how well various NLEs will work with this format, another thing I’m not clear on. Then, there’s just your tolerance for bleeding-edge technology in general.)

As to your DLT question: I haven’t investigated costs recently enough to know. I’ve dropped a note to a friend who works with enterprise-level backups to try to get more information and will pass anything along.

All in all, my gut is that a huge new market is going to open up in storing video data for archival purposes, and I would have to assume that Panasonic will be trying to spur it along. It probably won’t open as quick as we’d like and be at the price points that we like right away, but I think in a couple years the entire workflow will be very smooth and many people will have jumped onboard entirely, looking back at the days of tape-driven capture with nothing resembling fondness.

[Brian Deviteri]

Wow, it looks like you are definately right on this one. I just looked at external Maxtor OneTouch and Maxtor OneTouch II drives at the 250GB capacity and they are retailing for about $220 (shipping included in this price) online right now. This works out to $.88 per gig raw and unformatted or about $.96 per gig of formatted, useable space. On one of these drive you would be able to hold about 4.75 hours of DVCPRO-HD footage which works out to about $46.32 per hour of DVCPRO-HD footage that you are archiving on the hard drive. Cheaper than DVCPRO-HD tape? Yes, and it probably will be even cheaper in the future. Still expensive? Right now, yeah, this is a bit expensive for many of us that shoot 4-6 hours of footage in a production day. But in the end, are our clients willing to pay this additional price for “low-cost” HD/HDV acquisition? Some of mine would be willing, but this would really prevent some of them from even thinking of this HD/HDV solution for the sole fact that they shoot so much footage.

To put this into a bit more perspective…
Right now I am getting standard name brand DVD-R discs (4.7gb capacity) for about $.40 per disc (when on-sale) which works out to about $.09 per gig.

(note: all the prices above are USA dollars as of April 13, 2005)

[Deleted User]

[Brian SaenzDeViteri] “… The DLT tape solution is worth considering, but a company I do work for looked into that awhile back and it was cheaper to just use external hard drives for backup at that time for their purposes. Have the prices come down at all? …”

These folks have been making tape-based data backup systems almost forever, and some of their newer, single-tape & multi-tape gear is relatively inexpensive, considering what it does:
https://exabyte.com/

Of course, these devices are not generally intended for portable, battery-operation out in the field. And even “fast” tape backup systems are slower than you might expect. But again, you have to consider what they do, and how carefully they do it.

All the best,

– Peter

Just a friendly reminder to all: Please consider filling-in your COW user profile information so we have a better idea who you are, where you’re from, and so forth. It’s the friendly thing to do. Thanks!

[Luis Caffesse]

[Brian SaenzDeViteri] “But in the end, are our clients willing to pay this additional price for “low-cost” HD/HDV acquisition?”

Keep in mind this isn’t really “an additional price”
Like I was saying, backing up to hard drives is cheaper than shooting to tape. So shooting DVCProHD on P2 cards is as cheap as it is going to get.

If you weren’t shooting DVCProHD onto P2 cards, you’d be shooting it to tape, and your client would have to pay for the tape stock. In this case, they pay for the hard drive media required to do the job.

In the end, if clients can’t cover that cost, then HD production can’t really be that much of a priority for them.

Of course with the HVX the good thing is you can still offer DVCPro50 and DVCPro as options.

Luis Caffesse
Studio 3 Productions, Inc.
Austin, Texas

[Brian Deviteri]

I keep getting e-mail notifications of the same message in this thread, so far about 20 of them… anyone have any suggestions?

[Ed Dooley]

Tape or hard drive “backup” seems like a big step backwards to my workflow. Over a decade ago, we used DAT backup for all our programs (very time consuming), we switched to AIT, which sped things up a bit. But we never backed up all the hours of raw footage, of course, because we had it on tape. Just backing up mastered programs took forever! My last big project includes an ‘archive’ of 20 hours of footage. You can’t just look at the cost of a hard drive, you have to factor in the time you’ll spend backing all of it up for archiving. Then there’s the time in the field dumping (at 4 minutes a time) to the hard drive. I had thought that carrying the hard drive around was a disadvantage too, but it’s either carry that or carry a bunch of tapes around, so it’s a wash.
I would love for P2 to work, for all the benefits that have been discussed in this forum. Right now though, the benefits seem to be for ENG type uses, not for long-form video. Having said all that about the downside, having a real HD format may be worth all of those disadvantages 🙂
Ed