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Tape not dead yet (again)
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I like my DVCProHD on P2.
Tape = shedding, head clogs, dropouts, stiction, alignment issues. Really fun tape problems included D2 track overwrites and D1 humidity problems.
Pass me some more bits n bytes, ma.
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[Andrew Kimery] “XDCAM discs”
I like those also, but I just did my first job yesterday with my new Sony F3
SxS cards.
Love the look of that F3
Really really clean in the blacks. -
Talk to any broadcast news organization – there’s going to be tape around for a loooong time to come. The trouble will be keeping the decks alive to do the transfers of the archival footage. It’s still cheaper to store stuff on tape than it is to digitize it.
Joe Bourke
Owner/Creative Director
Bourke Media
http://www.bourkemedia.com -
[Joseph W. Bourke] “The trouble will be keeping the decks alive to do the transfers of the archival footage.”
I wouldn’t understate the importance of that. Having done preservation projects involving 1/2″ reel to reel video and 2″ Quad, the archive is only as good as the availability of the decks. Ironically some of the archival work was done to D2. I can also say the same for 3/4″ and even 1″ As machines become scarce along with their parts it is fraught with challenges. Personally I don’t consider tape a great archival format because tape decks themselves are not “archival.” I think tape gives a very false sense of security.
Personally I’m not really happy with any of the current solutions. I do hold out hope for an “optical” solution. XDCAM disc seems like a good combination as I suspect the playback mechanisms I suspect can endure. Sony introduced a device not to long ago with high capacity XDCAM like discs but I don’t see the kind of push behind it to make it ubiquitous.
Back in the 90’s I ran a multimedia dept. for a time. Every once in a while I find one of those master CDs buried amongst my things. There’s something nice knowing that I can pop one of those CDs in most any modern computer or an expensive external optical drive and they can still be read (not that the data is compatible with much today).
To me, something is “archival” when not only the media endures but the readers are readily available. There are way too many tape formats that have come and gone for me to have those sentiments about tape.
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I agree completely with you, Craig – tape is anything but a great archival medium. The point I was making (and I guess I didn’t make it clearly) was that the broadcast stations will always opt for the cheapest form of archiving, and that will be tape, at least for the next few years.
I broached the topic at a staff meeting at the station I used to work at, and was told that between hiring an archivist (or putting someone from in-house who knew how to structure a keywording system in charge of the process) and the number of storage arrays they’d have to purchase, such a move would never be in the picture. They were more than happy to limp along with the giant shelving system of 1″, 2″, 3/4″, Beta, and 16mm film, which only the chief photog had any idea what was where. The chief engineer was satisfied that he could keep a small number of decks going, even though parts were getting scarce and expensive.
When you look at the picture realistically, the only “valid” archival medium is 35mm film – it’s still being produced (for how long we don’t know), you can still play it back and convert it to whatever current digital format exists. Of course I’m talking about stuff which needs preservation: old documentaries, historical footage, early films, not the raw stock from a mailbox fire in Rutland, Vermont. Here’s some interesting stuff from the LOC:
https://blogs.loc.gov/digitalpreservation/2012/10/get-your-bits-off-old-storage-media/
Joe Bourke
Owner/Creative Director
Bourke Media
http://www.bourkemedia.com -
We’ve had really good luck with LTO tape.
The nice thing about LTO tape is that the standard is still evolving, backwards compatibility is built in to the spec, it holds any digital file format, and it can transfer faster than real time. You don’t need a “Sony” deck to playback a “Panasonic” tape.
It is less specialized than video tape. Other industries use the standard to keep their archives, namely IT and data centers as well as financial sectors.
LTO 5 made the tapes look and operate more like hard drives to computer operating systems and LTO6 takes LTFS even further.
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[Jeremy Garchow] “backwards compatibility is built in to the spec”
Recently attended a talk on LTO and it sounds like there’s some qualification with backwards compatibility.
For example, it was said that an LTO6 Drive and play/record LTO6 and LTO5. It would play only LTO4. It would not handle LTO3 at all. Basically they said the rule of thumb was current and previous 2 generations. Maybe that was inaccurate. -
2 generations is correct.
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When I bought my HDCam six years ago, I really didn’t expect to get my money back but it was a case of having to support broadcast deliverables and the lack of machine would have seriously compromised the rest of my business due to geographical isolation from any facility that could do the tape out for me.
So all these years later I marvel at the fact that there is rarely any issue with distribution on tape and the total pain that file based distribution so often is. Codecs, wrappers & data rates! Every time I deliver a file finish there is so much more management of these variables and so much more to and fro. Broadcasters want an exchange format that is robust physically and technically. Tape does this and like the broadcasters, I know that a tape deliverable will rarely require any major exchange of emails and testing.
So yes I now know why tape is far from dead or even undesirable. That said, broadcast is not far from dead so eventually tape will die because broadcast will become a smaller player.
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Tape is not dead, nor is it sleeping. In the last year alone, to 30+ different broadcasters and international broadcasters and distributors, I have delivered hundreds of HDSR, HDCAM, DBETA…(yes, DBETA….yikes) masters.
Completion Bonds prefer them. Copyright is now wanting DBETA Masters. I don’t see this transitioning anytime soon. If anything, it is still years away…
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