P2 Archiving

[Nate Stephens]

Have you done a search? There is tons of discussion on this point… and it all comes down to dollars..

[Jeremy Garchow]

[Nate Stephens] “and it all comes down to dollars..”

…and sense.

[Nate Stephens]

Jeremy, I constantly wonder how much “sense” it makes to save camera and edit footage.

The client expects it, but does not want to store his camera tapes properly if at all or pay you a vault charge….. “what’s that”

I have spent the last 2 days searching thru 15 hard drives of 200 to 500gb for a clients master TV project from 18 months ago. I have found the master edit project file but no master quicktime and I usually back up twice to two HD. He wants to replace one shot out of 7 in his commercial . I will still have to drive 3 hours, set up lights and shoot, drive back and edit. If I can find the master quicktime I just have to digitize and encode one 5 second shot and his new logos….. 2 days searching and the original shoot was less than a half day plus drive time….. And I consider myself pretty organized…..

I just should have said that is a new shoot… period…. What’s the sense in the search, they wont pay for it.

[Richard Harrington]

We give a self-contained QT at sequence settings as a digital master.

We charge $250 to archive and charge for a single drive.

Drive goes on the shlef… but client knows its not a guarantee.

We go to Blu-Ray as clients can request those and walk…
At $12 a disc… less than cost of a tape.

Richard M. Harrington, PMP

Author: Photoshop for Video, Understanding Adobe Photoshop, and ATS:iWork

[Nate Stephens]

Richard,

Yes Blue ray does answer a lot of questions and is on our Mac Pro Upgrade list this month…(now that it doesn’t look like Apple is going to cut prices or announce anything not iPhone)

But my struggle is, do I put the blue ray in the Mac Pro or in an external enclosure so I can share it with all my Macs…. and take on location..

[Richard Harrington]

One External covers us fine… Office of 14 machines

Richard M. Harrington, PMP

Author: Photoshop for Video, Understanding Adobe Photoshop, and ATS:iWork

[Nate Stephens]

Now the question, which external or did you build it your self?

I know Lacie has an external, but who else?

If you built it, did you find an esata external box that has firewire?

or use a firewire box and a esata to firewire bridge?

I quess the question is, is 400fw fast enough to maximize the Blue ray burner and not hang it up?

[Richard Harrington]

We got the one from OtherWorld Computing… Works fine

Richard M. Harrington, PMP

Author: Photoshop for Video, Understanding Adobe Photoshop, and ATS:iWork

[William Carr]

What P2 card size are you using? We use 8GB cards with our HVX-200 because they are practically a 1-1 match for DVD-DLs which even with the best quality media is cheap compared to Blu-ray, this to back up the original P2 file data. 1 DVD-DL = 1 P2 card. SImple and effective.

We shoot mostly 720 24p using pairs of 8GB P2 cards, that gives us 40-plus minutes between card swaps. This older smaller size card is now cheap to buy/rent since the higher capacities are out. When card-swapping is not practical, we have a Firestore and use both.

We also back up the accumulated converted Quicktimes to a single-platter external firewire hard drive for archive, per project. Between the DVD-DLs and external hard drives, it’s no more or less reliable than Blu-ray.

[Doug Nichol]

I would just buy a Quantum LTO-3 deck (around $2,800) and then back up your project to a LTO tape which you can either store for them or give them to keep. The tapes are only about $35 and they will hold 400G uncompressed or 800G compressed. This way if you ever need to go back to the project, you just re-import the whole thing and start work.