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Overwhelmed: what is the best solution?
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If I added up all the money I spent on deck repair and tape, then I added up how much I spent on all the hard drives I’ve had to buy, enclosures, cables etc I’d go back to tape in a moment.
And I’d sleep better.
Now I am looking at LTO, another $3000 to throw at this “dream” of a tapeless workflow.
Still hard to not feel that the manufacturers left us in the lurch with this whole tapeless workflow.
Rich Rubasch
Tilt Media Inc.
Video Production, Post, Studio Sound Stage
Founder/President/Editor/Designer/Animator
https://www.tiltmedia.com -
[Rich Rubasch] ” I’d go back to tape in a moment.”
Wow, I’ve never heard anybody say that before. That’s why I like coming on here.
A very wide spectrum of views.
How about loading in that footage in REAL time. I was just remember how much I miss that : )
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[Rich Rubasch] ” I’d go back to tape in a moment.”
[tony west] “Wow, I’ve never heard anybody say that before. That’s why I like coming on here. A very wide spectrum of views.”
Really? Tape has some big advantages: it’s a predictable, known, and standardized (saying “send it to me on Beta” is more meaningful than “send me a QuickTime file”) — but more importantly, as Rich points out, tape is its own archive.
I’ve had to go to LTO for archive, too. Tapeless acquisition doesn’t mean tapeless production.
[tony west] “How about loading in that footage in REAL time. I was just remember how much I miss that : )”
You have to watch the footage sometime…
Walter Soyka
Principal & Designer at Keen Live
Motion Graphics, Widescreen Events, Presentation Design, and Consulting
RenderBreak Blog – What I’m thinking when my workstation’s thinking
Creative Cow Forum Host: Live & Stage Events -
[Walter Soyka] “Tape has some big advantages: it’s a predictable, known, and standardized (saying “send it to me on Beta” is more meaningful than “send me a QuickTime file”) — but more importantly, as Rich points out, tape is its own archive.”
Tape being it’s own archive is nearly its only advantage. The other things you listed aren’t even true really. There are tons of different tape formats (VHS, beta, digibeta, HDCam(SR), D1-5, DV, DVCPro(HD), DVCam, U-matic, etc.). Standardization is a “sometimes” proposition with all kinds of gotchas when two companies collaborate. Heck, there are even issues inside big companies with tape standardization. Take Disney for example who up until recent years had tape masters of their films on D5, but then switched to HDCamSR which created all sorts of headaches for people going back and forth, and issues when pulling video for edits. Plus, compatibility with all these standards required having at least one machine for ALL these tape formats which is a tremendous cost.
On top of that, tape has plenty of disadvantages including the fact that its locked into a format, is bulkier to store, projects can’t be saved, only outputs, and is many times slower on import and export.
Tape obviously still has a place in production and post, but “going back to tape” just feels like moving in the wrong direction. Finding a solution to proper archive is important, but it’s definitely not tape. Perhaps cost-effective SSDs, cloud servers, or some other technology yet to be invented will solve the archive problem and allow tape to go quietly into that good night.
Andy
https://www.timesavertutorials.com
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[Andy Neil] “Tape being it’s own archive is nearly its only advantage. The other things you listed aren’t even true really. There are tons of different tape formats (VHS, beta, digibeta, HDCam(SR), D1-5, DV, DVCPro(HD), DVCam, U-matic, etc.). Standardization is a “sometimes” proposition with all kinds of gotchas when two companies collaborate. Heck, there are even issues inside big companies with tape standardization. Take Disney for example who up until recent years had tape masters of their films on D5, but then switched to HDCamSR which created all sorts of headaches for people going back and forth, and issues when pulling video for edits. Plus, compatibility with all these standards required having at least one machine for ALL these tape formats which is a tremendous cost.”
Sure, there are a zillion tape formats — but my point was that there’s significantly less variation within a particular tape format than is possible with digital files. File-based acquisition is pretty nearly sorted now, but delivery is still a flaming disaster.
If I tell you I’m sending you an HDCAM SR tape, you know exactly what you need to play it. If I tell you I’m sending you a QuickTime file, well…
But hey — the great thing about standards is that there are so many to chose from!
[Andy Neil] “Tape obviously still has a place in production and post, but “going back to tape” just feels like moving in the wrong direction. Finding a solution to proper archive is important, but it’s definitely not tape. Perhaps cost-effective SSDs, cloud servers, or some other technology yet to be invented will solve the archive problem and allow tape to go quietly into that good night.”
Why do you think tape is the wrong direction? LTO is a great format for the foreseeable future. High data density, high bandwidth, good shelf life, relatively affordable, and broad cross-industry support. There is no such thing as “cost effective SSD” in 2012 (nor will there be for some time), and cloud storage requires more bandwidth than any of us have if you actually need to recover data in a timely fashion. I can’t argue with you about technologies yet to be invented, but they won’t help anyone in the here and now.
I personally don’t pine for the days of tape acquisition and delivery. I’ve been using file-based workflows since well before they were cool. It just seems undeniable to me that file-based workflows have some challenges that tape-based workflows didn’t.
Walter Soyka
Principal & Designer at Keen Live
Motion Graphics, Widescreen Events, Presentation Design, and Consulting
RenderBreak Blog – What I’m thinking when my workstation’s thinking
Creative Cow Forum Host: Live & Stage Events -
[Walter Soyka] “Why do you think tape is the wrong direction? LTO is a great format for the foreseeable future. High data density, high bandwidth, good shelf life, relatively affordable, and broad cross-industry support. There is no such thing as “cost effective SSD” in 2012″
My comment regarding emerging technologies like SSD and cloud servers wasn’t to suggest that they are a current solution. I was looking forward to the future. SSDs will become cheaper as these things do and though bandwidth is a significant hurdle for cloud technologies, it’s not an insurmountable one. Many larger companies right now use server storage as an archive solution which are connected via fibre or ethernet (essentially a “hard-wired” cloud service). But I admit that nothing is standing out at this moment as a magic bullet which is why I said that tape still has a place.
But let’s separate LTO from my tape comment because when I said that “going back to tape” was moving the wrong direction, I was referring to an earlier post which said:
[Rich Rubasch] “If I added up all the money I spent on deck repair and tape, then I added up how much I spent on all the hard drives I’ve had to buy, enclosures, cables etc I’d go back to tape in a moment.”
Clearly he was not talking about LTO. He was talking about tape decks and tape versus file based workflows. Going back to THAT is going the wrong direction in my opinion.
LTO is fine for right now, but it feels like a temporary solution. One for shops that want to continue acquiring and editing tapeless, but need a cost effective, yet reliable archive. The future is oncoming and something will present itself as a more definite solution down the road, but I seriously doubt it’ll be a return to Beta.
Andy
https://www.timesavertutorials.com
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[Walter Soyka] “Tapeless acquisition doesn’t mean tapeless production.”
Most def. What is the value of X as a databased NLE if you don’t store the data?
[Walter Soyka] “You have to watch the footage sometime…”
Having just loaded a location shoot from tape, it was a major pain in the A mostly because all involved, including me, had forgotten our “tape” work habits – not enough pre-roll, using time of day time code – after just 2 years of tapeless my work habits had degenerated and loading the shots in FCP, with it’s awful handling of time code breaks, made me long for the log and transfer window.
Herb Sevush
Zebra Productions
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nothin’ attached to nothin’
“Deciding the spine is the process of editing” F. Bieberkopf -
The thing that worries me about archiving digitally is that remember, I have decades of archives that I work with. Well, I recently was handed a bunch of CDs from the 1990s and told, “we can’t get these to work – can you?” Well, my computer wouldn’t even recognize the discs; IT was able to open them, but they said the files were mpegs stored in a DAT file. IT says they have no way to open them. I haven’t tried yet, but I don’t have much hope. These files are now completely useless. And I’m sure that in 1997, they were created with cutting-edge technology.
Are the current formats that we use always going to be available? Or is someone like Apple going to say, “Quicktime is dead!” and stop releasing new versions?
So I do think that tape still has its place, and I’m WAY more comfortable having a tape backup for my digital files. Yes, I’d LOVE for everything I have to be located on a hard drive somewhere, but I also feel much more comfortable knowing that I also have a physical copy. If a tape breaks, it can be spliced back together. If a QT file breaks, it’s gone.
Case in point – IT had me transfer all of my files from my hard drive to the Apple server a few months ago because they wanted to be able to back everything up. And then I found that I couldn’t open anything that was over 3GB (I have a lot of files over 3GB). IT kept telling me it was fine, the files weren’t corrupt, just not accessible for some reason (I’m not sure they ever figured out what the problem was). Well, I obviously need them to be accessible! It took them a WEEK to figure out how to copy my files from the server to a portable drive. Let me tell you, that was one of the most stressful weeks of my professional life. Luckily, since everything we do is on tape, if I would have had to reconstruct everything that I thought was lost, I could have, though it would have taken me a good month to do so.
So yeah, tapeless archival makes me twitchy.
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Tape?
😉
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[Lynette Gilbert] “Are the current formats that we use always going to be available? Or is someone like Apple going to say, “Quicktime is dead!” and stop releasing new versions?
“I appreciate your perspective and even share it to an extent. I was the archivist for a local news station with over 7 years of footage (which is a lot considering they produced over 5 hours of on air content each day combined with off air content like broll, interviews and such. But I’d just like to point out that your issue with files can also be found in tape archives as well.
In another Disney story, I was compiling a tape master of Tron (the original). Well, in addition to the master being recorded on a D5 instead of the current archive model of HDCamSR, the surround mix was recorded on some strange audio format that I’d never even seen before (because D5 couldn’t handle all the audio tracks for the film). It was a major headache just finding a way to make use of the audio files because practically no one had any idea how to get at them.
The one upside to the worry of something like Quicktime going away (which is seems to be), is that Apple isn’t necessary to provide compatibility with QT. Plenty of products exist out there which can read and play QT files and convert them (when the time comes).
I don’t see the tapeless archive as solving the problems of legacy content compatibility. That’s a problem we’re likely to keep no matter what becomes standard in the years to come. But it can potentially solve problems like space considerations, speed of access, organizational problems (finding footage), and even content degradation.
Andy
https://www.timesavertutorials.com
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