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The language of letting go
Today we’re donating our HDCam deck to the local non-profit station because our clients don’t use tape anymore and the deck now has a resale value of jack squat. For 18 months it’s #1 job has been to collect dust and increase our unsecured property tax bill.
The Pros were so upset when FCPX didn’t support tape.
John Davidson | President / Creative Director | Magic Feather Inc.
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28 Replies
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[John Davidson] “The Pros were so upset when FCPX didn’t support tape.”
Had similar thoughts when I had to edit something shot entirely on tape. Yes, there are work-a-rounds with 3rd party equipment, but they aren’t very elegant. Yes, I know that tape is no longer the current medium, but there are millions of hours of footage on tape that will be around for the rest of our lifetimes.
Not a deal killer, just another compromise. There’s “new”… there’s “improved”… and they don’t always mean the same thing…
Mitch Ives
Insight Productions Corp.“Criticism may not be agreeable, but it is necessary. It fulfills the same function as pain in the human body. It calls attention to an unhealthy state of things.” – Winston Churchill
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I’ve only had one network delivery that was completely tapeless, the one I just did. Every network I delivered to still requires tape. If not HDCAM, or HDCAM SR…then LTO…but that’s completely different.
My other issue is that I still work on many many shows where the sources are tapes. Then again, I mainly do doc work.
Shane
Little Frog Post
Read my blog, Little Frog in High Def -
Welcome to the club. The continued existence of tape is largely an LA TV network vestige. Even there some want files first and tape later for archive. Part of the reason was the flooding of the Sony plant a few years ago. Part of it is that cameras are nearly all file-based these days.
In most of the rest of the US and maybe the world, it’s a file-based business. I’m in Orlando and there are only a handful of places that even have working tape decks, including the broadcasters. All of the broadcast spots (local, regional, national) get sent around as files. Corporate – only files. Even the handful of indie films I’ve worked on have ended up as files with an occasional tape requirement in the deliverables at some point down the line.
Even if we had decks, I’m not sure anyone is left who can change heads and maintain them. The last tape guru in the area took other employment.
Oliver
Oliver Peters Post Production Services, LLC
Orlando, FL
http://www.oliverpeters.com -
I’m an informal collector of working tape decks because of a Doc project that involves legacy tape formats from 3/4″ on up. That said nothing I have done has been delivered on tape since 2009. LTO doesnt really count in my view as tape delivery.
Functioning Tape decks are a growing concern in the sense that there are fewer places that can service decks and then there is the availability of parts. My concern is that there is going to be a big hole our collective archive of video material when it comes programming that was recorded on tape now that tape machines are dying out or being used up without a possibility of repair. -
Well, this may be a situation where someone with more time than sense can eventually print up some of the replacement parts for these decks to order. Gears are easy. Belts can always be sourced, but probably also printable, eventually, if not today. Motors can be replaced. Worn out guides and rollers can be machined from scratch via CNC machines, the reverse version of printing. Circuit boards, individual soldered components, tough, but not impossible. Recording and playback heads, that’s probably the hardest thing.
There would need to be a database of these most common wearing-out parts somewhere, where someone has taken a unit apart and digitized the key assemblies ahead of time. I can’t think of any person or organization that is or would take that on, unless they were like some of those monastery monks transcriptionists from before the Renaissance. Ideally, the makes of these decks would make their CAD files open-source after retiring the product. Some appliance companies do that today, enabling you to print replacement parts on-demand to keep a unit going is way cheaper for everyone than pre-building and then warehousing spares for decades.
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[Mark Smith] “My concern is that there is going to be a big hole our collective archive of video material when it comes programming that was recorded on tape now that tape machines are dying out or being used up without a possibility of repair.”
I’m archiving our organizations tape-based material. I’ve been through about 5 Betacam decks. When one breaks I just buy another one on eBay. But let’s be honest if you’re not capturing it to digital right now or soon, you are playing with fire. Tapes do fail after a few decades. I think there will always be some old working decks. Quite frankly the problem now is that there is an over abundance of old decks, the price they get is so low as to make it not worth people’s time to sell them. I’m sure a lot are thrown in the landfill.
At some point it may reach a tipping point, where there is such scarcity it drives the prices up.
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While it sucks that we can’t get anything for our deck, I’m happy that medium is dying. Tape was and is a huge pain in the butt. Anytime we had to lay back to tape we died a little bit inside.
I wonder what the people who came up with those horrible deck menu systems are doing now? My guess is they’re writing tax code. Or maybe they work for the auto industry designing car UI?
John Davidson | President / Creative Director | Magic Feather Inc.
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[John Davidson] “Anytime we had to lay back to tape we died a little bit inside.”
Why? Didn’t your editors understand how to work with VTRs? I’m not being snarky, as I know laying off to tape from FCP1-7 was generally inaccurate. But in LA there are plenty of folks to whom VTRs are second nature.
– Oliver
Oliver Peters Post Production Services, LLC
Orlando, FL
http://www.oliverpeters.com -
Because it was annoying. FCP7 would sometimes just throw you off a frame or two on the layback, and when you’re rushing for a 4:30pm Fedex shipment, that can be a bad thing. Then you had to make tape labels, a backup copy to ship, lay back a submaster tape every few weeks, etc.
We just delivered two spots 5 minutes ago and the entire export and delivery took 13 minutes and went directly to Master Control. That’s about as easy as it gets.
[Oliver Peters] ” in LA there are plenty of folks to whom VTRs are second nature.”
It’s very easy to overestimate the capabilities of people in LA. I’ve seen editors at all levels blow a gasket trying to lay back to digibeta – even inside network facilities. Even at the biggest and most expensive post houses sometimes things would just go nuts in the tape room. Logs would be wrong, a label would get the wrong ISCI, the mixer would drop the wrong tag on a version, an end page wouldn’t match a network graphic style correctly, a slate would be wrong, layback was drop code instead of non-drop, LTC would screw up when VITC would be fine, etc. When you’re 28 minutes into a layback and realize you have to redo the whole thing while you’re burning expensive session time – all the VTR technicians in the world won’t save you.
Another reason I hate tape comes from working overnights at CNN in the 90’s. Every night I would have to push a cart up to the 7th floor to Tape Evaluation and bring down about 500 tapes and boxes that had been degaussed. Then I would strip the labels off the tapes and boxes one at a time for hours. Not fun – and terrible on your fingers.
So yeah, death to tape!
John Davidson | President / Creative Director | Magic Feather Inc.
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[John Davidson] “FCP7 would sometimes just throw you off a frame or two on the layback, and when you’re rushing for a 4:30pm Fedex shipment, that can be a bad thing”
Media Composer, Symphony 😉
[John Davidson] “Even at the biggest and most expensive post houses sometimes things would just go nuts in the tape room. Logs would be wrong, a label would get the wrong ISCI, the mixer would drop the wrong tag on a version, an end page….”
Attention to detail, rules and best practices procedures. OTOH, how about making an insert edit into the end of a film to update the credit roll. The ugly side of files.
[John Davidson] “Every night I would have to push a cart up to the 7th floor to Tape Evaluation and bring down about 500 tapes and boxes that had been degaussed. “
Yes, it’s a pain, but you’ll get no sympathy from me, as I’ve run several large scale tape operations. I would call it character building for entry level folks in the business. An opportunity that seems to be gone these days. 😉
– Oliver
Oliver Peters Post Production Services, LLC
Orlando, FL
http://www.oliverpeters.com
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