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Tape is dead ???
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I’ve not heard of anything that does on the fly inserts into a file format. I can do it easily with my Fairlight bouncing audio but I have to then render a continuous file afterwards.
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We do a lot of tape duplication for a major international distributor and it doesn’t look like its going to let up anytime soon.
ALSO, we are doing a whole mass of memory card (ex1, P2 etc) playouts onto HDCAM for archiving.
Tape is definitely not dead here. -
[Baz Leffler] “ALSO, we are doing a whole mass of memory card (ex1, P2 etc) playouts onto HDCAM for archiving.
Tape is definitely not dead here.”Seems somebody should be using LTO. Yes that tape is definitely not dead.
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Joseph Bourke A lot of what’s in the Library of Congress is on paper prints – I don’t understand how that works, I’m guessing it’s like a contact print in still photography – I’ll have to read up on it.
The Library of Congress was in charge of copyrights 100+ years ago, when people were first trying to copyright movies. Moving pictures? Well, the way we copyright pictures is two copies on paper. So yeah, there was a process created that had rolls of paper with sprockets to print the entire reel of film onto paper.
There are a bunch of early films whose only “original” prints are on paper, including The Great Train Robbery and a bunch by Melies, whose son had brought many of Dad’s movies to the US for copyrighting in a country whose film business was starting to pick up steam.
The process for both paper and nitrate prints is classic DI – scan, clean, etc. – then printing back to film. Following a fairly basic protocol (25 degrees, 30% humidity), film can last thousands of years. It’s not even a matter of having film projectors in the future. As long as you have a light, a lens and a wall, you can get a pretty good idea of what’s happening.
Anyway, we ran a fantastic article written by the Library’s Ken Weissman that goes through the process, talks about the technology (including their consideration of digital) and generally finds a dozen ways to blow your mind. Great pictures of the archive, too.
It’s one of my smallest handful of favorites from among the thousands of articles in the COW library. You really, really need to check it out, kids. The Library of Congress Unlocks the Ultimate Archive System
Tim Wilson
Vice President, Editor-in-Chief
Creative COW Magazine
Twitter: timdoubleyouThe typos here are most likely because I’m, a) typing this on my phone; and b) an idiot.
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Staying a little more on topic (WTF???), saying tape is dead is like saying SD is dead. Of course it is. Absolutely, indisputably true.
Except where it isn’t, and won’t be for the foreseeable future.
That includes an awful lot of broadcast, which tsunamis notwithstanding, is still making broadcast masters on HDCAM SR. (We ran a whole article on hoarding…uhm, I mean supply management, of HDCAM SR last year.) It’s stable, reliable, and relatively inexpensive again, and you don’t have to worry about whether the NLE supplying your digital file is going to screw you.
Kind of interesting that Sony’s big push is for recording HDCAM SR to DISK — the format and the medium being two different things. Some of that is driven by their desire to advance technology rather than pushing old stuff that people don’t want…but like I said, there’s a lot more tape being used in places you might not expect.
Except where tape is dead.
Tim Wilson
Vice President, Editor-in-Chief
Creative COW Magazine
Twitter: timdoubleyouThe typos here are most likely because I’m, a) typing this on my phone; and b) an idiot.
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Working in digital services for one of the major Studios…. I can tell you with extreme confidence that tape is alive and well.
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What’s tape?
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Actually, tape is still valuable for archiving, having a long shelf life. Of course, you can only hope there will still be machines to play them down the road.
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[Chris Harlan] “Actually, tape is still valuable for archiving, having a long shelf life. Of course, you can only hope there will still be machines to play them down the road.”
Yep, I have a HP tape-backup device here that I used in the 90s when I was still on PC. The device works, the tapes are fine, but I have no Windows machine anymore….never tried if Apple had a driver for that old thing, but probably not…..I wonder of any client will ever need those files 😛
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Since tape is not dead, let’s resurrect Panasonic’s M II.
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