-
Tandberg VXA tape drive
After a series of deads of hdds -not only the “Live fast, die young” Lacie firewires, but also many hdd in various raid systems, X Serve Raid, Dulce etc. on my FCP suites- I just bought a Tandberg VXA 320 tape drive to backup and long-term archive all P2 files and quicktime masters in tape cartridges. The question is… Tandberg (former Exabyte) VXA X23 cassettes are presented with a “160Gb/320Gb compressed” capacity. Can anybody explain if I can compress a P2 file (that, I assume, is already compressed)? A single cassette costs 60$ or Euros, so that’s a good question. Thanks.
-
6 Replies
-
Gregorio
AS a rule of thumb, is it not advisable to compress any video files that have already been compressed, as is the case with P2 (or any format other than Uncompressed) and I am not even sure about that.
The type of compression that data tape cartidges use is not video freindly, and can permanently damage your video files.on the other hand, the price for a couple of tapes is still a lot less than P2 cards, or having to have a service perform data recovery on a hard drive.
as a side note, I was looking at that drive as they claim to use a very robust means of writing the data, such that it becomes much more un-vulnerable to normal data tape problems. If you can remember, let us bovines know how it works out in a few weeks
hope this helps
“I like video because its so fast!”
Bob Flood
Greer & Associates, Inc. -
We have one too. Its already compressed, so you will get the first of the two numbers on the tape with the 320 drive. Works like a dream, but takes a long time, so don’t recommend watching it happen…[Gregorio Paolini] “recommend”
-
Thanks Bob, it really helps. I’m going to archive the dailies of a series, so you’ll sure know how it works in a few weeks… Anyway, I’ll be back on FCP COW forum.
-
I have experience with Sony AIT data tapes which are similar. I’d recommend you make sure that you are NOT archiving with data compression. It makes the process a LOT longer and compressed video files won’t get any smaller. In fact when I was experimenting a few years ago the data compression actually made some video files a little larger.
Speed is your enemy with tape archiving. I’ve actually abandoned it. It just takes too long with too much manual labor to get the data on and off the tapes. And yea, leaving your data on hard drives is eventually going to be a big problem too. There’s just no good solution at this point.
____________________________________
Eric Susch
http://www.LetsKnit2gether.com
http://www.EricSusch.com
Follow me on twitter @EricSusch -
Eric, tape is just a – reliable, I hope – backup for me. 1 hour DVCProHD is 60Giga. It takes circa 80′ for Tandberg VXA-320 FW External Tape Drive to transfer them in a cassette. It’s an overnight job for Retrospect software. Archiving a tapeless format is anyway a nightmare: as you know, there is not a single really reliable hard drive. VXA tape is certified for 30 years. Who really knows? In just one year I lost 6 different hard disks, for a total of 4Terabytes of video. Obviously I had a backup for everyone on them, but in one case the backup hdd drive died the day after. And I lost the footage of two interviews for a docu (fortunately the docu was already on a master tape for the broadcaster). I think that the long-term archiving of the tapeless footage will be the big challenge of the next years…
-
I have been using Tandberg VXA for a year now and I am really happy with it. Feels so comfortable not having to worry about those hard drives.
Kool En De Anderen
MAC Pro 8 core/OS 10.5.4/Kona LHe/Apple FCS 2/Adobe PPCS3/Huge fibrechannel
http://www.koolendeanderen.nl
Reply to this Discussion! Login or Sign Up