After reading this thread, I've determined that a quote from Mark Twain is appropriate for this topic:

"The rumors of ... (tapes) death have been greatly exaggerated."

Cliff Etzel - Solo Video Journalist
bluprojekt | solo video journalism blog

I'm a little wary of flash for a couple of reasons.

First is I had a 3G file on a Sandisk flash drive that I copied to my hard drive. It was a Fedora ISO and the installation bombed part way through. An SHA1 hash is available and the copy on my hard drive was indeed corrupt.

The interesting part was that when I did the SHA1 hash on the original USB stick file it was correct. Copied it again to the hard drive and it was also correct. I find it spooky that an error occurred during the copy and XP didn't flag it.

Second to the best of my knowledge data on flash drives is still stored as a charge on a capacitor, a very good capacitor, but one which will eventually allow the charge to leak off.

Has anyone seen much information on the archival qualities of flash?

Larry

Ok memory failing. The charge is essentially stored in a small conductor surrounded by an insulating layer. Not really a capacitor but the quality of the insulating layer would still be important.

@LarryP- "Second to the best of my knowledge data on flash drives is still stored as a charge on a capacitor, a very good capacitor, but one which will eventually allow the charge to leak off."

Interesting. I haven't heard this before. I'm waiting to hear a response to this.......

Yesterday I picked up a 1Tb WD external drive (reduced as it was ex-display) for AU$170.

Comparing this to Mini DV Tapes for DV or HDV, this will hold 71 hours, at AU$2.40 per hour.

As that canary once said, Cheep cheep!

I had a bad experience once. I was hiking high in the mountains in amongst the clouds and was shooting some incredible footage onto DV tape. Unfortunately I keep my cell phone in the same bag next to my cam and it formatted/ degaused/ erased/ deleted/ &^%#@ the tape. Could that happen on a digital memory stick?

I know, I know it's ALL my fault :(

Comparing this to Mini DV Tapes for DV or HDV, this will hold 71 hours, at AU$2.40 per hour. . .and it isn't just that, Pete, it is ALSO putting all one's digital eggs in one basket? How would you feel if those hours of captured footage went bad 'cos of a corrupt HD? You can ONLY get up to one hour on a miniDV tape. If one goes it goes bad, then all the rest is available.

Grazie

Now that is scary!!
Do you have any idea how strong a magnetic field it takes to erase a DV tape?

We have a bulk tape eraser, the kind with a conveyor belt. Try as we might after numerous passes we cannot get one pixel to shift on a DV tape. One pass and SP/VHS/1" is pretty much blank. On top of that mobile phones produce hardly any magnetic field that I'm aware of.

This mountain you were climbing wasn't near Area 51 was it?
It's well know that some experimental aircraft use magnetic levitation.


As to your question, flash memory should be fairly immune to magnetic fields. However any static discharge to the pins and it'd be toast.

Bob.

When I tried to download the footage it looked like very dirty tape was used. I recorded on the same tape afterward and it was perfect.
Maybe it could have been that it was very cold and the cam was well below the standard operating temperature. I never checked the footage then because i was trying to conserve battery power. The cam has never given problems after that.

Does anyone know it temperature affects magnetic tapes or even memory media?

Yes Grazie, I know there's the eggs/basket risk, but I'm influenced by the fact that I now have 17 external drives of various brands and I've never had a problem with any of them.

- that plus the fact that the likelihood of needing to actually use this back up footage once a project is finished is extremely low - I've got a wall stacked with camera tapes, maybe 500+ , and I can only remember re-using any of them twice.

If I want to keep something as "stock footage", then this is archived separetely and severally.

- and ultimately, if the need does arise and my back up is corrupt .... to quote ole blue eyes, "That's Life".

Low temps affect everything.
Tape can become brittle, electrons move slower, grease and oil turn to gum, you can't even get a fluro light to fire up at around -20deg C. Batteries loose capacity and metals loose their strength.

Add moisture into the mix and you get head clogs.
Flash memory will fare better but you still need to consider all the other things that happen. To some extent electronics can be protected by self heating if you have the power source to keep it running. Keeping batteries inside your underwear is a good way to keep your batteries alive.

Bob.

Now the discussion gets interesting.
You can backup (duplicate) a HDD without thinking about it. The though of making a duplicate copy of 500 tapes is the stuff that leads to insanity. As someone once said "A shot doesn't exist until it's backed up in three geographically separate places".

I hade seriously thought about buying into LTO3/4 tape. It's the standard in most places for archives however not only are the drives expensive the tape carts are also friggin expensive.

But my interesting consideration is accessing the media. So OK you know you've got something that might work in your current piece. The client waits in anticipation while you find the tape...... You see a problem here? With HDDs or network storage clips are a mouse click away, you can try many different things very quickly, I think, in theory.

But Peter makes another good point, how often do we ever use all that stuff we've carefully archived. In my view stuff gets dated. Cars change, fashions change. Doesn't apply to a lot of our stock footage I know. In the end is it perhaps just easier to go shoot what you need?
Since I went tapeless I find it much easier to just "go shoot something". There's a creative side to all this as well. Not certain I fully grasp all the implications, maybe we were more creative shooting film when it cost many dollars per minute to roll the camera and waited a day to see a work print. Or maybe not. I'd really like to hear how others (grazie!!) feel about this.

Recent example. I'm working up for a high speed shoot. Big budget horrors. In less than an hour though I rigged up a test shoot with my EX1 at 60fps and sped that up, just so we could all get a feel for how it'd look using a high speed camera without spending big dollars. I couldn't do that with tape. On the down side they're now thinking maybe my EX1 and post fudging will be good enough.

The intersting part of this whole thread I'd hoped would be how these changes affect our creativity but so far almost everyone is focussing on if tape is dead, soon moght be or never will be. I don't think that matters much. What matters to me is there's a new, afforable way to shoot footage and surely it must affect our creativity.

Bob.

Yes it's a great topic Bob.

A year and a bit ago I shot a play in a very nice but very small community theatre, using two HDV cameras. One I was manning (personing?) on a tripod, the other I built a rig and hung on the back wall and it was recording my "save your bottom" wide shot (which I used for approx 4 seconds in the final edit) At the end of Act 1, which lasted 55 minutes, I had almost 2 minutes to change tapes in my Z1, ask a member of the audience, who happened to use crutches, to stand up so I could stand on his seat and change the tape in my A1 (bottom loader). I managed it, but aged a fair amount in the process.

Now with solid state recording, I can record for getting on for 2 hours, and easily change a full card whilst recording, when it suits me.

Yes, it's the shooting and copying rather than capturing that makes the new way a whole new experience.

Good example, Peter.

In the panel discussion at the Sony Online Expo, the four DPs mentioned that the actual shooting process was the tip if the iceberg. They were of the opinion that solid-state media really comes into its own (in every way) after the shoot.

About using your old media:

I very rarely use old archieved stuff also BUT:

Last year we went to Inagua and did some shooting, mostly wildlife (it is considered an Important Bird Area by Autoban), but also around town. That fall they got slammed by a hurricane (actually more than one, but one REALLY bad one).

The town was pretty wrecked, flamingo population changed, and the endangered parrots there didn't have any food because the berries blew off the trees. Other bird populations have shifted, but nobody has any hard info because its now alot harder to get there!

Now our footage may be worth more, not only financially but historically, if things do not recover. I have now backed the Inagua stuff up on two different external drives, both of them RAIDs.

Just a thought...
kairosmatt

Low temps affect everything.

Electrons move faster through conductive materials as temperature decreases. There is less ionic lattice interference. Think superconducting materials.

White Flag! I'm convinced!

Grazie

"Keeping batteries inside your underwear is a good way to keep your batteries alive."

Bob:
I'm not even going to make a comment on that.

My question is - if I sell my Sony FX-7 and buy a new camera that does not use tapes, is there any device that will play my HDV and SD tapes or be able to capture the tapes to my computer since I don't have a camcorder that plays tapes? Or should I keep an old camcorder around just to play and capture my archived tapes?