[Herb Sevush]

[Rich Rubasch] “has anyone heard any kind of rumor that Apple might be rolling out Final Cut Pro 8 and sending X to the ranks of iMovie?”

It’s only Thursday nite and someone’s already been hittin’ the wacky weed.

Herb Sevush
Zebra Productions
—————————
nothin’ attached to nothin’
“Deciding the spine is the process of editing” F. Bieberkopf

[Herb Sevush]

[Frank Gothmann] ” You can also use LTFS (Linear tape file system, driver & utility comes free with the drive)”

Does this utility come with the Cache-A system, or with all LTO drives?

Herb Sevush
Zebra Productions
—————————
nothin’ attached to nothin’
“Deciding the spine is the process of editing” F. Bieberkopf

[Herb Sevush]

[Scott Sheriff] “unless you are someone well know on the boards, I’m not going to your link for security reasons.”

Scott I think you are way out of line here. Franz is a great asset and highly respected contributor to this forum. His post was, I believe, a little tongue in cheek. We all get a little crazy with analogies here, no one more so than me, and it can get fairly silly. I have no intentions of changing my analogus way of thinking, but his link was enlightening and well worth reading if you have an interest in either logic or rhetoric.

Herb Sevush
Zebra Productions
—————————
nothin’ attached to nothin’
“Deciding the spine is the process of editing” F. Bieberkopf

[Herb Sevush]

[Bob Cole] “Clearly Walter and Herb are way ahead of me on this score. Help me catch up please!”

Actually Walter is way ahead, he actually has an LTO tape drive and uses it regularly. I’ve been researching this for about 6 months and I’m ready to take the plunge, just waiting to see what shakes out at NAB before I make any computer purchases.

LTO drives are a tape backup medium. The latest generation, LTO-5, can handle 1.5 Tb per tape (there is a compression scheme that can squeeze data 2:1 but apparently it doesn’t squeeze much out of video files so I probably won’t use it.) Most of the drives need a PCI SAS or fibre channel host card, although Walter has his hooked up over ethernet. The transfer speed is around 1 TB an hour using a SAS card.

These drives are mostly intended for large networked facilities and can come with cassette auto-loading so you can back up huge amounts of data unattended. That’s not what I’m looking for, I just want to be able to back-up my media files to tape. Simple single external drives seem to cost around 2500 – 3500, the tapes around 90 each. You also need software to run the drives, BRU seems to be the most recommended on the MAC side, I’m not sure about what is best on Windows. There’s also a company called Cache-A that makes what they call appliances where the LTO drive is teamed with it’s own hard drive for buffering and has multiple ways to connect to a system – they have their own software and go for around 6K – 7k. The Cache-A system is very highly recommended.

Herb Sevush
Zebra Productions
—————————
nothin’ attached to nothin’
“Deciding the spine is the process of editing” F. Bieberkopf

[Herb Sevush]

[Walter Soyka] “I used to let FCP manage its render files (keeping them outside of my project folder structure and abandoning render files when the project concluded). With Premiere Pro’s ability to manage render files on a project basis instead of a system basis, I can now keep render files in my project folders.”

Considering the nature of the work you do I would imagine some of your renders would be well worth worth saving.

AS for me, with FCP I would treat certain important renders as clips, copying them from the renders folder into the projects scratch media folder and renaming them before using. For the most part I’m happy to blow them away and let the program re-render as needed. I’m just looking for a way to recreate the security of a tape workflow in a tapeless world.

Herb Sevush
Zebra Productions
—————————
nothin’ attached to nothin’
“Deciding the spine is the process of editing” F. Bieberkopf

[Herb Sevush]

[Aaron Cadieux] “I think you might be mistaken.”

Your right, I’m wrong, my bad. I guess I haven’t keep up with the changes in Decklink models.

Herb Sevush
Zebra Productions
—————————
nothin’ attached to nothin’
“Deciding the spine is the process of editing” F. Bieberkopf

[Herb Sevush]

[Aaron Cadieux] “Blackmagic Decklink SDI – $295”

Do you realize this card doesn’t handle HD?

Herb Sevush
Zebra Productions
—————————
nothin’ attached to nothin’
“Deciding the spine is the process of editing” F. Bieberkopf

[Herb Sevush]

[Franz Bieberkopf] “outlining the many pitfalls of analogy and why it has the reputation for being “the weakest form of argument”.”

I’m a sucker for a girl with a bad reputation, or as the song goes, the sadder but wiser girl for me.

I love analogies; they’re colorful and information rich, a great shorthand way to make a complicated point. Good analogies are good, bad analogies should be exposed and fanciful analogies shall forever have a place in both my heart and my logical toolbox. They were good enough for Plato, they’re good enough for the cow.

If only I were clever enough to think of an analogy to this discussion of analogies.

Herb Sevush
Zebra Productions
—————————
nothin’ attached to nothin’
“Deciding the spine is the process of editing” F. Bieberkopf

[Herb Sevush]

[Walter Soyka] ” You’re just a tape failure away from having no copies of the project.”

I look at back-up differently. For me there are 2 different things to back up. 1 – Original camera sources recorded tapeless, 2 – Project media.

For project media, everyday backup to external hard drives and thumb drives works fine. At the end of the project I’ve been consolidating each job on hard drives; soon I hope to have a dedicated LTO tape for each major job to include all projects, graphics and music.

But it’s backing up tapeless camera sources that has me most concerned. We started going tapeless last season and I have a set of five 3tb drives in two different locations as backup. I envision changing that workflow so that as soon as I dump everything to my main raid I then copy all the camera sources to LTO5. Once that’s done and the tapes are in storage I can breathe easy again. I’ve never lost anything to tape loss in 30 years of editing, the same can not be said about hard drive failure. In this new workflow I can see no reason to also back up the camera sources to hard drives. If my raid fails it’s going to take a day to restore and rebuild no matter what the source. If it’s a matter of restoring old material, that never happens without some notice, and I don’t see the big speed loss with tape since everything I work with has to be moved to the raid before I edit.

I’m definitely not as thorough as Walter in my backup plan, and one day it will probably come back to haunt me, but backup strategy like everything else is a matter of balance – how much risk vs. how much cost.

Herb Sevush
Zebra Productions
—————————
nothin’ attached to nothin’
“Deciding the spine is the process of editing” F. Bieberkopf

[Herb Sevush]

[David Roth Weiss] “In case of RAID failure, LTO backup would get you back up and running in a day, or within 4 to 5 hours possibly. The near-line solution gets you up and running almost instantly, or in an hour or so for most projects.”

My situation may be specific but assuming the “near term” backup is a firewire 800 drive, I would still have to transfer that material to a raid for actual use. Unless I’m misreading things Firewire 800 is 800 Mb/s (mega bits). The LTO 5 spec is for 140 MB/s (mega bytes) – which equals 1120 Mb/s or nearly 50% faster. So I don’t see the time saving for hard drives. Now I could definitely have screwed up the math somewhere along the way, but for the moment I just don’t see the hard drive advantage.

Herb Sevush
Zebra Productions
—————————
nothin’ attached to nothin’
“Deciding the spine is the process of editing” F. Bieberkopf