[Ju Dor]

Bear in mind if you get LTO6, that you will probably want to migrate at a later date to something better (and faster…)

So if you’re writing a very small number of tapes that’s ok, but if you have a larger quantity of data, you will be migrating from a 160 mb/s media to something much faster, thus creating a bottleneck and wasting a lot of time in the process. Not worth skimping on a few hundred quid to get an LTO 7 drive in my opinion.
I am still waiting to invest into LTO7 and have been holding off LTO6.

If you can’t afford to buy into a technology, hold off until it becomes affordable or until you can afford it.
Furthermore, LTO8 onwards are NOT compatible with LTO6 by the way, which makes LTO7 all the more attractive right now, as it’s the perfect bridge between past-present and future storage.
My 2c

[Ju Dor]

Well actually, I have read that for LTO-6 drives, the cache on the HH (Half Height) drives is twice as small as the cache on FH (Full Height) Drives, which results in lower performance.
So at the current price of LTO-6 drives (they are cheap because LTO-8 is only 1 generation backwards compatible…) , make sure you get a Full Height one.

This is not a concern on LTO-7 drives by the way, where HH and FH drives all have the same cache anyway.

[Ju Dor]

Price for LT0-7 tapes has come down from $128 to $88 in the last 9 months (with a steep momentary rise in August before going down further).
Do you think we can expect substantial price drops over the next couple of weeks/months?

Now that LTO-8 is coming in LTO-7 seems to become more affordable an option (with better future proofing too I guess)

I also read incidentally on this interesting link ( https://www.millgate.co.uk/IT/img/news/lto.pdf )
that the buffer size of LTO-7 drives seems to be the same, whether they are Full Height (FH) or Half Height (HH).

This is a big plus, as LTO6 drives have a smaller buffer on Half Height drives. (LTO7 drives buffer appears to be the same as Full Height LTO-6 drives).
This is particularly interesting for our industry, where we often end up writing a lot of small files, from dpx image sequences to cache files.

LTO-7 is also all the more interesting now that Asus have released Aquantia 10Gigagbit network cards (and 5gigabit ones I think too) for 100 bucks, so fast networks + fast backups for small production companies are finally becoming affordable

[Ju Dor]

Well I don’t have a mac at present apart from a 2009 MacBook Pro, so that might actually work.
If not, I could get a macMini for it.
Does any of the mac gear with thunderbolt support that OS?
I am considering the BMD Teranex as well

[Ju Dor]

Has this been solved yet?
Old thread but still relevant
I assume the same issue happened with the Intensity Pro card (I don’t have Decklink)
Thanks

[Ju Dor]

I see this thread is 5 years old.
Has there been any development on the 8/10bit front.

There is an article from 2015 on RedSharkNews by Craig Marshall, who used the Decklink + the HDLink to output 10-bit DVI & HDMI to their Benq PG2401PT monitor.

https://www.redsharknews.com/post/item/2265-how-to-build-a-system-to-run-resolve-on-a-shoestring?page=2

“This device accepts the SDI signal from the Decklink 4K SDI card with a ‘loop through’ facility and converts it to DVI, maintaining the 10bit display quality. I loaded up a quick 14bit greyscale ‘ramp’ test TIFF and switched between 8bit HDMI and 10bit DVI on the monitor. Voila, no gradations! Ultra smooth on 10bit DVI”

That said, Craig wrote as a comment on another post, that
“{he has} been using BenQ’s 24″ version of this monitor (PG2401PT) for grading in DaVinci Resolve for over a year now and it has proved exceptionally accurate and very stable. I drive it from a Decklink SDI card, converting the 10bit SDI signal to Display Port via the BMD HD Link box. (a Dual DVI version of HD Link is also available)”

[Ju Dor]

Hi Trevor
What do you mean with this? and have these issues been resolved (no pun intended) with the latest versions of Resolve 12 and Premiere CC 2015.2

sequence clip always starts at beginning of source clip.

XML – again cuts in right place but source clip always at start

I like the idea of scene detection. Could save a lot of time.

Also, has anyone had any luck with this script for premiere?
https://aescripts.com/magnum/

[Ju Dor]

But that crowd also have listed lto-7 ibm media at 199usd, not the ibm listed 400e
Surely that s going to go down further within a few months right?
https://www.tapeandmedia.com/ibm-lto-7-tape-ultrium-tapes.asp

[Ju Dor]

@Tero
Can you elaborate on this? I am interested in Resolve as an encoder.
Are you saying it powerful enough to encode several sequences simultaneously? I guess this would depend on the computing power + drive speeds, but that’s interesting nonetheless

“if you have a lot of sequences you’d want a software that can read multiple sequences in one folder like Davinci Resolve”

[Ju Dor]

Wow that is very expensive
So far, the media were always affordable, as in below 100usd on release, then dropping to 30/50usd within a year.

What’s going on with LTO-7?
Drives, even internal will be mad money and the tapes are hardly worth it, even at 189usd.
Currently, the FUji lto-7 tapes are being advertised by M-Logic at that price, which is significantly less than the IBM pricelist, but grossly overpriced all the same.
If one was looking to invest into a single LTO-7 drive, it would make more sense financially to purchase 2 x LTO-6 drives for the same price, in order to double up the throughput and speed.

Will the price of LTO-7 media eventually drop down to 100usd or 50usd.
If so, how long do you reckon it will take until LTO7 becomes better value than LTO6?