[Bob Cole]

This would be such a massive climb-down for Apple. It is hard to envision the company culture allowing for it.

[Bob Cole]

Several questions:

1. There are heavy costs to archiving: a heavy initial investment, time, attention, and even the tapes themselves. If you archive a client’s work, do you bill the client for that service, or is this part of your overhead?

2. It is often stressed, when transferring XDCAM footage, for example, that verification of the copied media is critical. If you are just using drag-and-drop to send data to an LTO-5 tape, is there any verification?

3. You write:
[Jeremy Garchow] “At that point, we can plug a hard drive right on to the ache system and archive straight to tape. I tend to “stage” media in tape size pieces. Once I have around 750 GBs of data, I make a tape, then I immediately make another one which is taken home (offsite).”

Are you saying that you make an LTO tape immediately, or that you don’t make any LTO backups until you have accumulated 750GB of data? I guess that would be okay, if you had a very steady and predictable flow of data. But it would mean being exposed to the vagaries of hard drive failure for some period of time, at a stage when the project was most important.

(The sad truth is that for the vast majority of commercial projects, the finished product is the only thing the client really has much interest in, once the project is done. I would think that the most critical period for LTO backups would be during the editing phase, not after.)

Thanks for sharing the information about this important subject.

Bob C

[Bob Cole]

This has been an interesting thread. I would appreciate more details regarding hardware and software. It’s all about data management, and the very specific approaches used are quite important. Clearly Walter and Herb are way ahead of me on this score. Help me catch up please!

Bob C

[Bob Cole]

[Walter Soyka] “Tape is just not as convenient as true nearline storage.”

I agree with Weiss and Soyka. I use a similar pattern, in my case RAID 5 (CalDigit), hard drives, and LTO-3. Although the software (Retrospect) with which I copy to LTO-3 has very good indexing, it is true that for ease of retrieval, hard drives are the backup of choice. My Mac Pro’s three internal “extra” SATA drives are a wonderful way to make and park quick backups of critical material, when I have “drop-dead”-lines and can’t afford to lose an hour.

I am looking forward, when it gets a bit less expensive, to switching to LTO-5 or LTO-6. But even then, tape presents a dilemma as to just how to organize the backups. Currently, I backup by project or client. That makes it much easier to reload the material, because when I do have to reload data, it is always for a given project. But it is a lot less efficient to do the backup that way, which means I wind up NOT doing tape backups as often as I would like. Due to the limited capacity of LTO-3 tape, I think I’m locked into that method for now. But for people like Walter, with LTO-5, do you just have the tape system backup everything that is new, every day? And if so, do you find that to be crippling when it comes to retrieval of data, in a pinch? Because I have several projects happening at once, and if I were to backup daily, the material for any one project might be spread over several tapes, and the material for any one CLIENT would be spread over many, many tapes.

Reloading material is a regular requirement, even if your RAID never fails. Whenever I reload material from an LTO tape, it is because I thought the project was finished, and had deliberately deleted it from the RAID — and not once because the RAID had failed. My CalDigit has been fantastic; when a drive died, I had a new one ready to pop in and it rebuilt the RAID redundancy in a couple of hours.

Bob C

[Bob Cole]

[Herb Sevush] “every teamster who ever ate a doughnut on a set?”

Alright Herb, very funny, but I resent this unnecessary slur against doughnuts.

bob c

[Bob Cole]

Thanks Todd and Mark! Todd wins the Most Practical Award (aka “advice so simple I’ll actually try it”), but Mark takes Most Ingenious AND Best Illustration. Statuettes are in the mail.

I appreciate the help.

Bob C

[Bob Cole]

Good suggestion. That works well. Thank you.

Bob C

[Bob Cole]

[Curtis Thompson] “did you have something else in mind?”

I was just hoping there was something as easy and straightforward as QT screen recording, with the addition of system audio.

But I will look for the software you mentioned. If anyone has a specific, virus-free title that would be most helpful.

Thanks Curtis!

Bob C

[Bob Cole]

All that Todd and John said.

Also, re the flicker: That is a good idea and can be a lot of fun. There are even devices which can “flicker” a tungsten light with repeatability (important for narrative films, as you are going to be filming your wide shots and your close-ups out of order, probably). I’ve used the Great American (?) and Magic Gadgets flicker/dimmers. Your rental house should have one.

Bob C

[Bob Cole]

Hi David,

It’s not just the budget; you are looking at an array of very different cameras and workflows. I strongly advise you to try before you buy. My personal choice was the EX1R and I’m delighted with it, but if you ask a dozen DP’s, you’ll probably get 20 answers.

Trade shows can be good opportunities. Sometimes you “know” just by picking up a camera. I have rejected so many inappropriate purchases at trade shows that I figure the trips have saved many times their cost. Then there’s the whole issue of how your post-production workflow will change to accommodate tapeless media. Once you narrow it down, check out the special forums on the COW to ask your questions.

You may want to save a good portion of that budget for the accessories to make this camera “all it can be.” Some of the cameras on your list need a lot of extras (shoulder mounts, to start) to make them useful for the types of shooting you mention.

Good luck and have fun! You’re going to enjoy your new camera a ton – all of them on your list are great.

Bob C