[Neil Sadwelkar]

Fraser,

I had a look at the clip you uploaded. Can’t say what the audio glitch is, but the quality of video is poor, compared to what I remember U-matic looking. I’ve come across some U-matic originated clips while editing/conforming docus with archival footage, and U-matic video looks better than what you’ve uploaded. For that matter, even VHS looks better.

I think you need to get a better deck. Or get this one fixed.

As an example, here’s an old Indian TV show where the video has been digitised off U-matic tape. Even this is not a good example of how U-matic looked. I’d say even this is only a fair transfer.

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=WanOZiQsZY0

Unfortunately its rare to come across a well maintained U-matic VTR. But if this transfer is worth a decent amount of money, you could get in touch with a retired broadcast engineer, and buy a couple of VTRs eBay and then use them as parts to recreate a working system.

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[Neil Sadwelkar]

With U-matic (high band or low band), I hope you’re using the ‘Dub’ output which used to be ‘Y-C component’ and which yielded a significantly better image than composite. Also, for Betacam, the component out provided better images than composite.

Digitising analog SD res U-matic and Betacam tapes will create files at about 16 GB/hr if you choose ProResHQ, or 11 TB as ProRes. It is hard to predict the future of any codec or format so it’s hard to know how long ProRes will be relevant/readable in the .mov form. But ProRes has proved durable, so far, and even if it gets deprecated, there will be sufficient advance warning, and re-transcoding 1000 hrs of ProRes to some other format would be a manageable task in the future.

If you want to be codec independent, you could choose to digitise to Uncompressed 8bit 4:2:2 YCbCr, and even that will need about 70 TB for 1000 hrs. Do trials of small portions and review them to get a fix on the format/codec.

For long term storage of digitised files, LTO tapes would work best, with the caveat that every about 5 years, they need to be reviewed and migrated to the current format that that time. Here too, your quantity – 1000 hrs SD – would consume about 1 LTO-9 tape at ProResHQ, or 4 LTO-9 tapes at Uncompressed 8-bit.

For the low res public access format, H.264 works best for playback on most of today’s devices. If you’re using YouTube/Vimeo for publishing the content for public preview, then at their recommended bitrate for SD, 1000 hrs of 480p would amount to about 900 GB.

If you have 1 VTR each for U-matic and Betacam, with a 40 hr week and 1000 hrs split between the two formats, you’re looking at about 13 weeks or work doing the digitising. The transcoding will happen in the background.

You could even consider getting the digitising, transcoding, and QC managed remotely. And have someone at your end only changing tapes. Depending on the condition of the tapes, you’ll need lots of head cleaner, and air sprays. For some tapes, you may even need to physically open the cassette to clean it of fungus on the tape.

Neil Sadwelkar

[Neil Sadwelkar]

Hi Michael,

I noticed your post has no response on the forum. So, maybe you got someone tom help out, who reached out to you directly. Or maybe this is still unanswered.

Let me know if they’re still looking out for someone. I can point them in the direction of someone who may be of help, depending on where they’re located.

Neil

[Neil Sadwelkar]

Does your laptop have USB 2 ports or USB 3 ports? Both are possible as Apple did have at least one MBP model which had Thunderbolt 2 but USB 2 ports. Later models had Thunderbolt 2 and USB 3.

This matters because if your MBP has USB 3 then you don’t need to bother with Thunderbolt 2 or 3 at all. Just use USB-C drives and simple USB-A (which your MBP has) to USB-C cables and your transfers will be fast as well as your camera people’s.

<font face=”inherit”>Your 2014 Mac Pro, </font>if its the Cylinder model, then that too has USB 3 ports.

Neil

[Neil Sadwelkar]

Your 2015 MBP most likely has 2 Thunderbolt 2 ports. And 2 USB ports. The USB ports on it may by USB2.0 or USB3.0

If your USB ports are USB3 then with a single drive or even 2-drive RAID, you will likely get the same speed from a USB3 port as you would from a Thunderbolt 2 port. USB3 drives are considerably cheaper than Thunderbolt 2 drives.

Thunderbolt 2 delivers better speed with 4-bay RAID drives and/or SSDs. Anything less, you’re better off with USB3.

If your MBP has USB2 ports then, of course, Thunderbolt2 is faster.

To use those ports with a newer Thunderbolt 3 drive, all you need is an Apple Thunderbolt 3 to Thunderbolt 2 adapter. There are other make adapters, but Apple’s is the only adapter that works in both directions.

Your MBP’s Thunderbolt2 ports are compatible with any Thunderbolt 3 devices with this adapter, but it will not work on a USB-C device even though the connecter matches.

You could also consider (for a higher cost) a Thunderbolt 2 dock that gives you a bunch of ports from one Thunderbolt 2 port.

Neil

[Neil Sadwelkar]

The system I described, is working at a small cable TV channel post facility. They have 5 systems – cylinder Mac Pro and iMac connected to a 10GigE switch which also connects to a Mac mini via a Solo Thunderbolt 3-10GigE adapter. The Mac mini has 5 Drobos connected to it and these 5 edit systems connect to any of the Drobos as needed.

They don’t have great performance because, Drobo. But they’re managing.

Previously they used to connect one Drobo to each system and use small drives to share data between systems. Or physically move the Drobos as needed.

Their media is 1080p ProRes. LT for editing, and HQ for finishing. They were using FCP 7 but have transitioned to Premiere Pro.

Anyway, you have to have a SAN, then XSAN is built into MacOS and Apple has a guide on how its setup and administered.

https://developer.apple.com/support/downloads/Xsan-Management-Guide.pdf

Neil

[Neil Sadwelkar]

This is not a SAN. A SAN would require the Mac mini to be a ‘metadata server’, run special software, which would implement the rest of the infra needed.

What I’ve proposed is simple ‘SMB reshare’, using sharing tools built into MacOS.

There was a time when this kind of sharing would need to be administered by a different OS. It used to be called MacOS Server. Apple discontinued that, and made Server into a separate app. We used to use that for sharing drives between systems. Then even that was deprecated, and now the MacOS contains all the ‘parts’ of software needed for simple file sharing and resharing.

That’s what you will be using. So its not SAN, its not NAS. Its just sharing drives. And it works just fine for small networks.

One day when you add more machines and have more than 8-10 machines, then this arrangement won’t be efficient. That’s when you’ll need a ‘real’ NAS or SAN.

Till then, this will work fine. Try it.

[Neil Sadwelkar]

OK so your storage and network seem to be working fine. The UniFi Switch XG 6 is a 10GigE switch and both the MacPros have 10GigE adapters. Even your Mac mini has a 10GigE adapter so ideally you should be able to read and write upwards of 300 MB/sec to and from the shared storage.

What you should do is connect both Mac Pros and Mac mini to the switch. then give all three fixed IPs is a series like even 192.168.0.1, 192.168.0.2, 192.168.0.3 with subnet 255.255.0.0. Then, you can simply mount the storage attached to the Mac mini, on either Mac Pro by going to network in Finder, or by Go > Connect to network, and typing 192.168.0.1 as the address (assuming the Mac mini is 192.168.0.1).

You can then mount the drive on both Mac Pros and work like it was a local drive. You Mac mini is now acting as a ‘server’.

This method of ‘reshare’ has worked fine with as many as 8 Mac systems sharing a SAS RAID attached to one ‘server’ Mac.

Neil

[Neil Sadwelkar]

1. Cataloging software — I checked out the 2 you mentioned and I didn’t see any specific LTFS / LTO support. Would I simply drag the mounted LTFS volume on my HD to either of these software choices for them to make the catalog or can I import a manifest or is there a better way to connect through Canister?

Both DiskCatalogMaker and NeoFinder treat a mounted LTFS volume as a drive. So you simply drag and drop the LTFS volume to the software and it scans and presents it as a drive. In DiskCatalogMaker, you can even have multiple LTFS volumes in one catalog, or you can drag catalogs from one to another. So, you could have multiple tapes inside one DiskCatalog and search across tapes without mounting them.

I have Disk Catalogs of even 40 drives inside one catalog and can search for one file or folder within those. And then mount that tape and extract that file/folder.

The file format of the catalog is .dcmf or .dcmd and you can park it in your Google Drive or Dropbox so that it accessible to you anywhere. There is a provision to save thumbnails of the media but that’s time-consuming so I don’t use it.

And, you can export this info as a csv and build a spreadsheet as well.

Neil

[Neil Sadwelkar]

Shawn,

About the other things you’ve mentioned in your post.

You definitely need some cataloguing software to be able to browse, at one place, the contents of your drives, and to be able to store an offline record of the contents of the LTOs you are writing.

Take a look at DiskCatalogMaker or NeoFinder.

Writing many small sessions or 1 TB or fewer long sessions of 11 TB to fill out an entire LTO-8 tape. No difference, really. No gain or loss in doing either. But if you can choose between the two, I’d go with few large sessions than many small sessions.

Doing double backups. Yes there are dual drives, and software that can write to two tapes simultaneously. But if you don’t have access to either, then writing it all over again is the only way. Hence, fewer long sessions make this less painful.

Resources online. I’ve tried to find them too, but there don’t seem to be any except this forum. I’ve had to discover many things by trial and error. But I’ve been blessed with a continuous amount of LTO backup work to do, with no real time restraint, so I’ve had the time to try things out. I’ve bought and tested many software along the way.

In the pandemic, I’ve had to to a fair bit of this ‘remote ops’, not for LTO, but for editing, motion graphics, VFX systems and such like. It’s not the same as actually working on a machine, but at least it’s safer.

If it helps, I can have one of my team members (or me) operate the LTO backup for you remotely. All you have to do is to connect and disconnect drives and remove and insert tapes when needed, we can take care of the actual operations. Any troubleshooting we will do remotely. And it will all happen in front of you on your machine.