Ken Hon
Forum Replies Created
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Aloha Noah,
I think that you can demux the vob and strip out the original mpeg strings and just author them back together with new menus and absolutely no loss of resolution. I did this for one of our DVDs after a computer crash and was able to reconstruct the project relatively easily, as long as you don’t modify the original mpeg program streams. I was actually quite shocked at how fast I googled up a demuxing program and had deconstructed and reconstructed our disc. Quite enlightening.
Aloha,
Ken
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They should work fine. Our first stuff we did was on 35/75 and now we are using 20/40 35/70 40/80 Tapes which I assume are really 40/80 tapes. You get lots of tape you never use as you only put 4 GB to tape on each one. So sort of expensive ($30 vs $1) compared to DVD-R, but like I said, we actually saw the results.
Aloha,
Ken
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Aloha Bob,
There are lots of new flavors of DLT that are more expensive and have higher densities. I don’t know how many replicators have moved up to these. However all will take 20/40 tapes, but these days most tapes are 20/40/80 or something like that. Anyway, you can get by with the older, much less expensive drives that wrote 20/40 tapes rather than a new DLT. Again DLT1 is not the same format as the other DLTs. DLT III is way old so don’t go there. DLT IV is what you are looking for and almost all of these are Quantum 4000 drives but many are hidden under other brand names.
And to clarify, writing a discimage file to a DLT is not like a backup job. Backup software doesn’t do this. The best thing is if your DVD authoring software supports DLT Tape drives so you directly write to it just like you would a DVD-R.
Ken
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We initially sent DVD-R masters to the replication house and were getting about 1% or so returns-problems. When we switched to DLt masters the problems have almost totally disappeared and are very rare.
Quantum made all the original DLt IV drives. I think it is the 4000 that is the best deal cost wise. DLt I drives are not the same, so don’t get one.
PS I’m not a serial killer, my keyboard is broken so it will on do small t’s.
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Frank,
While ReelDVD won’t do really complex projects, the other side of the coin is that it’s simple to use. We only author stuff about once a month, so it’s easy to pick up and use. Also, it writes really well to DLT. At first we mastered to a DVD-R and sent it to the replicators. We were getting about 1% returns. We switched to DLT and have probably sold 4000-5000 DVDs without a return. Don’t expect to make fancy hollywood stuff, but if you need a reliable donkey to get you over the mountains, it’s good.
Aloha,
Ken
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Thanks Barry for the detailed information! We are almost always carrying our stuff for several miles and I wanted to get a handle on the weight penalty imposed by the hard drive. Shouldn’t be too bad. Now I just have to wait patiently for Christmas while the Panasonic and Firestore folks work to get these things ready. It should be a remarkable new year.
Aloha,
Ken
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That’s a very cool idea Barry, hope someone uses it. By the way, do you have any idea what the power consumption for these (or any hard drives) is like? Do they halve your battery life or are they better than that.
One last question too, having not had any of the small panasonic products. Are their batteries as good as the Sony Li batteries for the PD-170 etc. The large, hi capacity batteries for those cameras are excellent. Just wondering if there is an equivalent for the Panasonic cameras.
Thanks,
Ken
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Noah,
I think Brian might be confusing deinterlacing with pull down. The important thing is that the Sony has interlaced CCDs and has to deinterlace to get progressive (not to mention it does it in some very funky, poorly understood way) and the HVX will have progressive chips from which it can generate a full resolution interlaced image. If delivered as stated, it’s going to be a very cool camera. And I think the Sony is a very cool camera, but the HVX should be really amazing.
Aloha,
Ken
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Aloha Prem,
I looked up the specs for your drive on the HP website and they say the following
The HP StorageWorks DLT VS80 Tape Drive provides customers with mid-ranged servers a value priced solution for their backup needs. It has a capacity of up to 80 GB compressed and can back up 6 MB/s compressed (assumes 2 to 1 compression). The DLT VS80 provides Backward Read Compatibility (BRC) with the DLT 4000 and read/write compatibility with DLT 1 media.
It appears that this drive cannot write DLT4000 format, which is what most replicators have standardized on, although it is possible that your replicator can take DLT1 ofr the VS80 native format (call and ask). All DLT4000 type drives were made by Quantum, so if you can find one of any brand it should work. And stick with SCSI drives as Noah suggests.
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Also Shannon I just noticed I wrote a number down wrong in the first post.
1.148148 should have been 1.48148. Don’t know if that makes the mud any clearer.
Aloha,
Ken