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Tape is dead ???
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[Jeremy Garchow] “Tape, as a delivery method, is alive and well. There’s nothing that can beat it at the moment in terms of ease of shipping in a short time frame. “
Which is why it’s nice to be able to export to tape from within a NLE, with the ability to punch in corrections from a timeline directly to tape.
Herb Sevush
Zebra Productions
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nothin’ attached to nothin’
“Deciding the spine is the process of editing” F. Bieberkopf -
[Herb Sevush] “Which is why it’s nice to be able to export to tape from within a NLE, with the ability to punch in corrections from a timeline directly to tape.”
There’s always Avid and Legend for tape transport.
Hopefully, AJAs Control Room comes out of vaporware.
In my opinion, there needs to be a major rethink on how media is handled. NLEs need to become better managers then they currently are. They are based on a old and antiquated “reel” system that doesn’t make any sense in a tapeless acquisition environment. That is not to say that a “reel” isn’t important, it just needs to be redefined.
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[Herb Sevush] “[Chris Harlan] ” a move to LTO for archiving ”
Having started the LTO process for myself, the one thing I will say is that there is very little standardization with this technology. I’m using BRU archiving software, which runs on Mac and Linux. This means if you have a PC system, or id you don’t have the right software, you can’t read my files. Until something like LTFS becomes the defacto standard, LTO5 will not replace videotape. A successful archiving standard requires that any tape can be played on any machine.
“Oh, yeah. I’m still a tape advocate. It was just tough to be one when you couldn’t get any.
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I agree that proper media management is of greater importance now than in the past, but I think the physical ‘reel’ will make a comeback in the relatively near future as the price of flash media falls to the point where we won’t have to keep dumping and reusing cards. A card, just like tape cassettes and film reels before it, will be able to be shot once, ingested, then put on a shelf.
I really, really, really hate the ‘card dance’ that must happen to proper recycle a card for shooting. So much more room potential for error and total loss of media.
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I agree with Andrew – once the price of solid state media (whatever that becomes) is inexpensive, we will have hard media just like tapes. LTO Tapes, or inexpensive SATA drive backups is the equivalent of having a “beta tape” on the shelf.
As for the requirements of the networks, etc. who still want a D5 tape, this is all based on union labor, whose 55 year old morons refuse to learn anything, and it’s easier for management to say “send us a tape” as opposed to retraining these guys. Do you think that if a network facility or TV station had all guys under 30, that anyone would actually say “send me a Beta SP tape” ? Being 56 years old myself, I can tell you that these idiots at the TV stations have died, but no one has told them that they died, and they are still alive only because the Unions prevent them from getting fired.
Bob Zelin
(can you say Aspera and Signiant ?) -
[Andrew Kimery] “I agree that proper media management is of greater importance now than in the past, but I think the physical ‘reel’ will make a comeback in the relatively near future as the price of flash media falls to the point where we won’t have to keep dumping and reusing cards. A card, just like tape cassettes and film reels before it, will be able to be shot once, ingested, then put on a shelf.
“Perhaps.
For some media types, this is already possible, but it still doesn’t make much sense to name something “Card_55” when the footage from that card might get repurposed, broken apart from its native structure, or transcoded.
It needs to move beyond a physical medium and space on the shelf, but that’s just my opinion. It’s too easy to make a copy/duplicate and the physical medium becomes less important.
Also, the user metadata might change, so it’d be nice if a reel could be a unique ID that lives with that file.
In the case of op-atom MXF, that reel needs to be assigned to video and multiple audio files.
I agree that it would be great to have the camera card originals to hang on to as a deep archive if they were cheap enough. It would logistically make things easier as well if you need to hand off footage to another person.
As far as the price of cards, I have never ever ever had a problem with the more expensive cards in p2. We used to shoot a whole lot of it. I’ve had issues with cf cards (from Red and others) more than I care for. When you compare the cost of an expensive card to the cost of a reshoot, it’s small.
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[Herb Sevush] “A successful archiving standard requires that any tape can be played on any machine.”
This is possible today, but it’s all about the software.
You can’t stick a digibeta in a dvcpro hd deck and expect it to just work.
Cache-A in their lto4, for example, writes to a tar format and can be read by other drives.
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Until the EDL is dead we still need reels. That you can use reels to refer to folders of tapeless files is useful and it means EDLs, our last great hope for system to system transfer can live on.
Tape will be long gone but I suspect reels may survive, even if as a novelty way to describe folders, cards, SSDs etc.
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[Michael Gissing] “Until the EDL is dead we still need reels. That you can use reels to refer to folders of tapeless files is useful and it means EDLs, our last great hope for system to system transfer can live on.
Tape will be long gone but I suspect reels may survive, even if as a novelty way to describe folders, cards, SSDs etc.”
Of course. That’s why I said it needs to be redefined, it could point to an actual file, and the files physical location on a hard drive/SAN/server would not matter. A file structure can and will change over the course of it’s useful life. A more modern reel naming system will help keep track of the files, as well as, tc and other metadata, even file name, but file name isn’t even unique enough.
Like this:
This is a unique ID of a p2 file (generated by an XML send to fcp7). I can copy and paste this in to spotlight and find the file. It’s not pretty but it’s highly accurate.
Jeremy
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Well, indeed. Broadcast is a whole ‘nuther mutha. Tape is also the cheapest (best?) long term storage medium (for now).
But I think it can be safely said that if tape is not dead, it is being politely shown the door. No one will be using tape in 10 years.
I know of two small post houses who moved into new locations. In each instance, they decided to sell off some of their decks. Devices that cost $35-45K were sold for peanuts. It was painful.
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