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Tape not dead yet (again)
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Kind of like vinegar, yeah.
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Joakim Ziegler – Postproduction Supervisor -
Yeah, write one generation back, read two generations back is correct. This is less of a problem than it seems, since you can still buy older generations of tape drives, and they’re cheap.
If you’re using an LTO-5 drive today, you’ll probably not be writing anything older than LTO-4 anyway, and you can read LTO-3 on that same drive. If you have LTO-2 tapes or older you need to read, you get an LTO-3 drive, which can read LTO-2 and LTO-1 as well, and will run you around 1000 dollars.
That’s a lot of backward compatibility for very little money compared to video tape. I see a Digital Betacam deck will still run you around 50000 dollars new…
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Joakim Ziegler – Postproduction Supervisor -
[Joakim Ziegler] ” I see a Digital Betacam deck will still run you around 50000 dollars new…”
New, yes. “Used”… anywhere from $1400 to $2500. Just picked up an A500P a couple of weeks ago for 750GBP, and it is in use today. Tape is not complicated — file delivery seems ridiculously poorly understood and for anything more than 2 GB — seriously? Three days of upload? FedEx is faster.
jPo
“I always pass on free advice — its never of any use to me” Oscar Wilde.
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Yet the availability and low pricing of used tape decks itself speaks volumes on the decline of use and value.
Of course tape is still in use. It’s declining though. I do think within a couple of years even the use of HDCAM and HDCAM SR for broadcast will decline.
Odd that you mention FedEx. I have no problem FedExing a file on some media (optical disk, flash drive, thumb drive, etc) and often times the package can be a lot smaller.
The issue with file delivery is that there are so many variables that are often poorly communicated. I can’t speak for others but I know I can often re-encode and redeliver a problem file faster than I was able to replace and reship a bad dub.
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I know it’s just my idiosyncratic view of archival but If I have to keep or purchase older generation machines that bothers me. As the years march on I feel I’m accumulating playback mechanisms over time and they too must be “archived” (maintained or replaced) adding another layer of bother.
Yet, I personally find it comforting that I can still put a 15 year old CD-ROM in a modern Blu-ray drive and read the data. I’m not saying that the current state of that is an ideal archival alternative but my fantasy would that any archive created today would be retrievable on the current technology 20 years into the future.
As I said that it’s my idiosyncratic view but I really don’t want to archive playback devices.
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What kind of connection are you on?
Just a month or two ago, EFilm in Los Angeles sent me a master in ProRes 4444, it was about 150 GB, and I downloaded it from their Aspera server to my office in Mexico City in about 8 hours or so. We have a 50Mbit symmetrical fiber connection at the office, it costs us something like 150 dollars per month.
I don’t see FedEx being faster or cheaper at all.
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Joakim Ziegler – Postproduction Supervisor -
[Michael Gissing] “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.”
This would be fixed with higher bandwidth and a standardized delivery format.
If someone specified D5 and you delivered SR, then there’d probably be some calls and emails.
With something like Telestream Pipeline, or any hardware based file maker, standardized file formats will be as easy as tape.
IMX50 seems to be a fairly standard SD broadcast/archival format, but there hasn’t been a clear winner in HD.
I deliver a lot of spots each year and not one station asks for tape. Another distirbition service that I use frequently has a certification process, which means they pre-test that your file are proper, in addition every spot has a pass at QC as well.
Granted, spots are short and easily transportable.
A TV show,or movie, can easily be 200 times the size.
If bandwidth was 100 times faster and we had easy “cloud” storage, tape would stop making sense.
As soon as the digital equivalent of putting a tape on a shelf becomes ubiquitous, then the digital revolution will stop being televised.
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[Jeremy Garchow}”This would be fixed with higher bandwidth and a standardized delivery format.
If someone specified D5 and you delivered SR, then there’d probably be some calls and emails.”Tape has always had less variables and machine manufacturers so it has long been easy to have standardisation. Video files and codecs however are getting more diverse and in many ways less standard over time. H265 is going to challenge existing Mpeg2 and Mpeg4 rough standards and of course RED have introduced their own deliverable and streaming 4k codec. In that environment it is no wonder that broadcasters still want tape.
I am delivering a job to a museum and making minor requested changes to frame size and data rates on previously working mp4 files suddenly meant the player didn’t work. It also didn’t play on the director laptop but it played perfectly on my laptop and my media server into a Sony TV so the files were not corrupt.
Another example. A friend of mine runs the biggest short film festival in Australia. For the first time ever they allowed file based delivery. The mess of codecs, wrappers, frame sizes and frame rates plus the clogging of ftp servers with typical late entries meant so much more work that previous years when tape was mandated. The extra cost and work plus the variable results at screenings has made the organisers consider seriously going back to tape only deliverables.
So it is easy to say we need to standardise. The need to develop better delivery codecs and manufacturers constantly introducing new wrappers means that the chance of getting stable file based delivery consensus is looking less likely that six years ago when many techs at broadcasters advised me that they would accept files within five years. They still don’t. So yes it can work but with the current dogs breakfast, tape already does the job.
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[Michael Gissing] “They still don’t. So yes it can work but with the current dogs breakfast, tape already does the job.”
Of course, because the infrastructure is still in place and the format is determined.
I disagree that it is easy to say we need to standardize. There are no more standards, so how can it be easy?
Lets use your buddy’s film festival as an example.
With tape, the format is set. Everyone will know that they need to get their finished file on to tape in a particular resolution and frame rate.
On order for this to be just as easy in a file based system, there are certain things that would need to be in place as well as a decent internet pipe.
There are services such as Aspera Connect which dramatically speed up upload times. If your buddy could rent a server space that offered this service for the entrants, then the “clogging up” of ftps would be negated as the service will be offloaded to a backbone that could handle it.
Then there’s the issue of format. There are many digital formats available to choose from, your buddy would have to pick what’s best so that it can be easily manipulated or conformed.
As far as the entrants, Adobe Media Encoder can make almost any kind of broadcast compliant digital file.
So, once you have the delivery service and the format, then tapeless is easy and fast, but this costs time, money, and knowledge.
There is no free lunch, tapeless delivery does require some planning and testing. Once that is taken care of, tapeless delivery is much easier and faster than tape.
The distribution service I mentioned in my previous post makes you go through these hoops. During the certification process, you must send a wide body of work that represents that types of projects you will need to deliver. Basically, they are checking your work. Once you pass the certification process, the process is very simple and fast. I can have files uploaded and out to broadcasters in a matter of hours, sometimes it can go faster than an hour.
I can not do that with tape.
I hear you, there’s a myriad of options with tapeless delivery, but it doesn’t have to be so hard. Tape sets the format rule, so you just have to do define the rules with tapeless.
Jeremy
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[Jeremy Garchow]”I disagree that it is easy to say we need to standardize. There are no more standards, so how can it be easy?”
This was a response to your post that said we could fix file delivery with ‘a standardized delivery format’ That is an easy thing to say and obviously you agree by saying there are no more standards so how can it be easy to do. It isn’t easy so it is only easy to say not to do.
The issue with my friends and their festival experience is that it was less economic and actually offered them no advantage to take files. Of course they can improve issues like acceptance and perhaps even publish some basic specifications. My point is that regardless of that, the extra effort did not and may not pay off so why change from a working system like tape until such time as tape is harder and more expensive to them. Deliverables are driven by the clients customer in my case. If it makes it harder and more expensive for them to take files then that explains why they mostly don’t.
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