SONY.... please, please.... PLEASE.....

Comments

Terje wrote on 7/31/2008, 6:53 PM
<I>I'm not sure I understand why that would be[/i]

Temperature changes. Alternating temperatures is bad for electronics. Worse even than wear and tear. Way back when, the accepted dogma was that a HD that was spinning most of the time would live longer than one that was started and stopped. I'd love to see data indicating that this has changed.

The oldest drive I have is in a 1987 laptop that has run 24/7 since 1993

The longest running I have is one running OS/2 1.3 and a specialized application. It was acquired just around the time 1.3 was released, so around 1991 I guess. As yours, this has been running constantly since it was bought, in a temperature controlled room. I would be surprised if it had started after being stored for ten years, but I've been surprised before.
johnmeyer wrote on 7/31/2008, 6:54 PM
Here is a summary of a report which no longer appears to be available:

Will DVD make VHS disappear?

According to this, it was 2002 when annual sales of DVD players in the U.S. became larger than VHS sales, but there still were at that point in time almost four times as many VHS players in people's homes as DVD players. This HAS to happen because it is a mathematical impossibility to have a larger installed base of a newer product until AFTER that new product is outselling the old product (unless the old product is disposable or gets quickly taken out of service).
blink3times wrote on 7/31/2008, 6:56 PM
"I'll accept that DVD players might have finally sold more units into homes than VHS units have been in homes...but not that DVD anything has finally caught up to VHS sales of anything in a proscribed period of time"

Either way Spot, the point has been made. Although tape will no doubt whither and die at some point... it won't be anytime soon. It is a DEEPLY rooted medium and will therefore die a very LONG and slow death.

Meanwhile there for SURE is more money to be made attracting new customers (and old) with updated methods of capture and ease of... and personally speaking I think you're just plain wrong to say anything other than that.
johnmeyer wrote on 7/31/2008, 6:57 PM
Alternating temperatures is bad for electronics.That is definitely quite true. Even slowly alternating temperatures do some weird things. For instance, I have a tripod that has adjustable feet, and if I don't use it for a few months, the feet unscrew and reveal the spike used for traction on outdoor surfaces. Very strange.

The more rapid the temperature change, the worse the problem becomes.

farss wrote on 7/31/2008, 7:27 PM
"I too, find myself using other tools from time to time because of a lack or clumsy implementation in Vegas."

Yes, that's what I'm getting at.
No, Vegas and XDCAM EX works pretty damn well for me too. It could be better though.
MPEG2 on HDD, there is issues with it and Vegas, at least from the DR60.
MPEG2 on CF, some here are having another set of problems.

Yes, I'm playing devils advocate because what I can do is almost irrelevant in the real world. I can wear my Vegas T Shirt and shout and wave my arms around for all I'm worth trying to promote Vegas but it always comes back to the work arounds and the things that don't work right. They don't affect me much at all, I'm not on tight deadlines and I have the skills to wrangle and work around whatever I have to, to get the job done. Try promoting Vegas to people in the front line of this business though and start talking about work arounds and their eyes just glaze over.

A few years back Vegas had an advantage over most NLEs not because it was better as an editing system but because of what they couldn't do. That advantage has faded. It's not enough to make me jump ship completely for sure, well not yet. But it's harder to find a compelling reason to stick with Vegas either.

Please don't get me wrong, I'm not having a dig at you or Vegas but this is not the time for SCS to be complacent either. The less things Vegas doesn't do fully the better it's placed to be the mouse that roars instead of ducking the elephants while looking for a niche in the marketplace.

And if I seem a bit uppity lately well here's a thing that's not irrelevant to this discussion. I've had two weeks of grief in my other business because marketing kind of oversold the product and the client is being a right PIA. The new business's management just wanted to give them their money back and cast them adrift, after all what's one sale. I spent a lot time explaining to them that one of the reasons we now have a significant market share is thanks to oiling the squeaky wheels in the past. We might have lost a bit making them happy but they've become our best customers, they're the ones that are talking us and the product up and have created more ongoing sales.

Bob.
johnmeyer wrote on 7/31/2008, 7:31 PM
It is a DEEPLY rooted medium and will therefore die a very LONG and slow death. Yeah, I think that is the key to this discussion. It is very hard to disagree with Spot as to the tremendous advantages of non-linear media storage. If flash memory costs become equivalent to tape, and if flash or HD media can be easily used to store more professional versions of HD (i.e., HDV and even pro-HD formats), then tape usage will wane.

But boy are you right about how long some things take to disappear:

The 3.5" floppy was introduced back in the mid-1980s and until the past few years was still shipped with many PCs, even though I don't think software has been delivered on floppy for over a decade.

The CD-ROM was first shipped in the early 1990s, and almost twenty years later, pretty much every PC on the planet can read them. Even though most drives are now DVD drives, I seriously doubt if the ability to read this "obsolete" format is going away soon.

Of course some formats die quickly. The most amazing to me was the demise of vinyl. It went from being ubiquitous in 1984 to being dead by about 1990, with most of that decline happening in a 1-2 year period. I remember going into Tower Records somewhere in that timeframe, without having been in a "record" store for about a year and being totally floored that the only vinly records were in a half dozen bins in the back of the store.

VHS tape (rentals) took longer to disappear, and I think there are still a few stores that have tapes for rent, but certainly not any of the large chains. It is pretty much dead (RIP).

Getting back to the main point of these thread: Sony development did a poor job in Vegas with both DV and HDV capture. They are both buggy and lacking features <insert reference to about 100 threads in the past few years ...>.
It is pretty clear that their team isn't what it used to be and the pace of development and innovation is pretty slow compared to the Sonic Foundry days. Thus, if I were the development manager, I'd probably make a similar assessment to Spot's, namely to concentrate on a few things that will matter in the wars ahead, rather than to fight the battels which are almost over. This stinks for those of using tape, but it is pretty darned clear that this is how Sony is thinking.

Of course if I were head of the development team ...


Seth wrote on 8/1/2008, 9:30 PM
It's funny, actually, that at DreamWorks Animation there is one Vegas system, just one... in the BFE corner of the basement of the Editorial building. And it's used for one thing only -dubbing tapes.