[Eric Hansen]

[Jeremy Garchow] “Just curious, if you force connect a file, does it reconnect?”

yes, but we’re talking about a massive amount of media in multiple places – timelines, bins, multiple projects etc. reconnecting a file in a bin doesn’t reconnect the same file in the sequence, or in another project. we estimate reconnecting by hand this way would take weeks.

[Jeremy Garchow] “What is the source, meaning did you capture from tape? Red transcodes? Tapeless?”

a bunch of different stuff. HDCAM SR tapes captured through Log and Capture. Varicam P2 and Canon DSLR footage through Log and Transfer (run 2 times to make one set of ProResHQ files and one set of ProRes Proxy files). RED, Phantom HD, GoPro, etc. everything has been transcoded to both ProResHQ and ProRes Proxy at 1080p23.98 to make things easy on the editors so the timelines aren’t rendering nightmares.

i also tried to use Media Manager on the projects that show Unspecified Path, to see if it would work similar to roundtripping XMLs. but MM wanted to rename the files in weird ways. it wanted to call new files “1” or “3”, but sometimes it would rename to its full correct name. i don’t get it.

i’m trying an app called “FCP Reconnect” i hope that works.

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Eric Hansen – https://www.erichansen.tv

[Eric Hansen]

a Drobo may work as Nearline backup, but i would NEVER archive to it. if you’re using hard drives as your archive medium, then you need to assume that they will fail after 2-5 years and will need to be replaced. you should also be spinning them up every 6 months or so to make sure they still work. realistically, no one ever spends the time to do this. when i explain these things to clients, they start to get more receptive to other options like LTO.

yes the Cache-A is expensive, but damn is it simple. hey, you shoot DVCPRO HD on P2 cards. when we used Varicams with DVCPRO tapes, we had to buy a 1400 deck from Panasonic to play them back. that’s about $20k for the deck. i’ve paid $65k and $100k for HDCAM and HDCAM SR decks respectively. wait, the Cache-A is cheap. and you get WAY more data on an LTO tape than a DVCPRO or HDCAM tape.

skip hard drives and go with LTO.

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Eric Hansen – http://www.erichansen.tv

[Eric Hansen]

Bob, you and i are very much on the same page. it’s really frustrating trying to manage assets with no asset management software, no matter the price. the times have changed. a few 400ft mags of film have been replaced with enough P2 and CF cards to leave the cameras on all day. there’s 10-100 times more footage now to keep track of. the old methods don’t work anymore.

taking asset management out of the question though, has anyone any experience with Shotgun? it looks like it would be a great scheduling and production management app. kinda like the EP apps, but web-based. i’m gonna ask over in the CatDV and FCSvr forums.

thanks

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Eric Hansen – http://www.erichansen.tv

[Eric Hansen]

hey bill

i am also a BRU PE user. I have a HP LTO-4 drive connected via SAS to a ATTO R380 card that is also serving an SAS RAID, used for an ethernet SAN. make sure you keep tape devices on a different channel than hard drives (random access and linear access cannot be on the same channel).

let me tell you of a few of the negatives i’ve encountered:

– i’m currently using an old unsupported version of BRU PE. i tried to upgrade to newer versions, but i would get really weird glitches in the interface and some functions didn’t even work. it really threw the Tolis support people for a loop. since i had to do these “experiments” on the same Mac Pro that acts as our 56TB server, i could only mess with this when the office was closed. since our facility is sometimes running 24/7, this meant days or weeks with no LTO backup going. it was really frustrating and i’ve stuck with an older version of the software because i’ve figured out its glitches and have learned to live with them. Tolis keeps telling me to upgrade to get new features and stuff, but i just don’t have the time to mess around anymore. as far as i know, my experience with this is unique. Tolis could not reproduce it and they didn’t know of anyone else with these problems.

– i bought another SAS card and put it in a computer on our ethernet network, thinking i could backup parts of our SAN from there, and stop needing to be on the server. nope. BRU PE only works with direct attached volumes, similar to Pro Tools. it could only backup our SAN if it was running on the same computer that the SAN RAIDs were attached to. the only solution here was to copy everything over to internal drives on the client computer, and then move them to tape. 800GB over even GigE takes too long. i told Tolis about this and they said they might add network support in the future. at the time, i was the only one who requested it, so who knows how high this feature request is on their list.

– BRU PE doesn’t create a searchable database for your tapes. so i also create separate databases that i can search to find media, projects, etc, which then tell me what tape my media is on. you can’t rely on BRU PE for this.

– using a proprietary format doesn’t bother me that much, especially since every version of BRU is backwards compatible all the way to the beginning of their business. the engineers have told me that there’s a bit of redundancy built into the filesystem. so if a tape physically breaks, you don’t lose your data at the point of the tape breakage. as a result, their LTO-4 tape capacity is more like 700GB instead of 800GB. i like this. you can also download and run any BRU product in read-only mode for free. so your tapes are always recoverable if you have the correct drive.

– i avoid spreading info across tapes. i make sure my archives fit on one tape and i group them that way. this keeps my databases accurate. i was thinking about getting an autoloader when we were really slammed and needed to be running backups constantly. but i didn’t like that i could write an 8TB archive, but not really know what files were where. i would just know that tapes 120-129 had my file somewhere. this is the only way to run an autoloader with BRU PE and i didn’t like that. we run 2 single tape drives in doubler mode (writing an in-house tape and out-of-house archive tape at the same time).

these are just some of my experiences. your milage my vary. but in the end, i’m happy with LTO-based backup. i’ve lost too many hard drives to not use tape. our office has written over 250 LTO-4 tapes in the last year, and we’re writing new tapes everyday. i’ve used the original SDLT 600a, so i know what the Cache-A box is like. it’s great. the price is a bit much to swallow, but it’s dead simple that’s for sure. the advantage i had with the 600a is that everyone in my office understood how to use it. they could write tapes and recover files very easily. with BRU PE, there’s only a few people that know how to use it, and they don’t understand it that well.

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Eric Hansen – http://www.erichansen.tv

[Eric Hansen]

[Matt Geier] “In the world of Video Editing and Real Time RAID performance, stripping tends to be very bad. It’s a lot of Large I/O’s that need to go back and forth quickly on the disk, and stripping in most cases adds a lot of overhead that tends to slow down the disk performance. “

Hey Matt. could you go into more detail here? i thought the opposite is true in terms of I/O performance on a RAID-0 stripe. are you saying that if 10 editors were hitting a RAID-5, they would get more performance than if they were hitting a RAID-0?

thanks

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Eric Hansen – http://www.erichansen.tv

[Eric Hansen]

i’ve adopted ProResHQ as my standard codec because of generational issues. i’ve worked on a few projects where we’ve reexported the same Quicktimes multiple times. ie, taking the final Quicktime of a commercial, replacing a single shot and reexporting; then 3 months later doing the same thing again with a different shot, but using the Quicktime from 3 months ago instead of the original. before i know it, i’ve got 3 or 4 generations going. standard ProRes can’t handle this nearly as well as HQ. that’s the only reason. granted, i shouldn’t be doing that, but many times there’s just not enough time to do things correctly when faster works. for U-matic, i’m sure standard ProRes would be fine.

another reason: mixing formats in FCP’s timeline. we work with a few cameras that benefit from transcoding to ProResHQ, like the Phantom HD. but FCP will want to do a preview render on anything that doesn’t match the timeline codec. by dictating to my AEs that ALL footage should be captured or transcoded to ProResHQ, my editors don’t have to deal with preview renders in the FCP timeline from different formats.

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Eric Hansen – http://www.erichansen.tv

[Eric Hansen]

thanks john

so, taking this one step further. we already have a set of 5 Zeiss primes. we also have a few from other manufacturers. considering that investment, and what we’ve already invested in our PL cameras, would it make more sense to buy 7Ds with PL mounts, than to deal with putting EF mounts on our CP.2s?

thanks

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Eric Hansen – http://www.erichansen.tv

[Eric Hansen]

thanks for the insights guys. have you had any issues with film you’ve bought this way? i spoke with our cines here and they didn’t like this idea due to possible bad stock. we did it in Chile because the stock was unopened, still in the can, and never left the fridge. one issue they brought up is the fact we shoot reality-style and don’t do dailies. we might not know for over a month that a shot was bad and re-shooting isn’t an option.

thanks

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Eric Hansen – http://www.erichansen.tv

[Eric Hansen]

i agree with everyone here. i had the exact same experience as Bob with Seagate and they’ll never get my business again.

another vote for 7200RPM drives. not because of the usual reasons, but because of the new wave of “green” drives. they will be 5400 or they won’t say what speed they are. they spin down to save energy and they make the computers pause (beachball of death) as the drives spin back up. as green as i like to think i am, i can’t stand a slow computer.

btw, awesome time of year to buy this sort of thing. bare hard drives are loss leaders for many stores.

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Eric Hansen – http://www.erichansen.tv

[Eric Hansen]

cool to hear that BD discs are down to $1 each. i buy the inkjet hub printable ones that tend to go for more.

you’re pretty much on the mark when it comes to LTO. i only recommend it to shops that are putting away 20TB+ a year. but i wanted to throw that out there as an option because it gets forgotten these days. but here’s 2 quick observations from my one-man shop:

i have written 6 700GB LTO-4 tapes which have my projects from the last few years. that’s 2 sets of 3 so i can have one set in my office and one set in a safe deposit box. i don’t own the LTO deck, one of my clients does and lets me use it. 3 tapes fits very easily in my deposit box. if i transferred these 6 tapes to 25GB BluRays, that would be 168 discs. that would be 84 discs to place in my deposit box. i also have a lot of files over 25GB, so i would have to span multiple discs to save these files. so for me, BluRay is still too similar to DVD for me to consider it. but like all things, everyone’s needs are different and your mileage may vary. i don’t use hard drives for archive. i’ve had too many fail on me. they’re built to spin, not sit on a shelf. if you want to use them for archive, you need to pretty diligent about spinning them up every few months and checking for errors. i would suggest at least 3 copies with hard drives instead of the usual 2 just because the failure rate is higher. then transfer their contents over to new media every few years. yes you need to do this with tape and optical too, but i know with LTO i have more time between data transfers.

either way, looks like a cool little device.

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Eric Hansen – http://www.erichansen.tv