Blink, have you tried the Kodak Preservation DVDs? They're not that much of a premium over the standard fare, under $3 each, with an 80-100year life expectancy.

At this point you'd probably want them in a Bluray size.

THanks boys.

So, archiving seems to be a major drawback when using HDD and Flash.

Sooooo, how do u HDD and Flash guys archive your goodies?

Bit

I switched from tape four or five years ago. Archiving isn't a "major drawback" at all, I store everything on hard drives.

500 gig SATA hard drives are about $100, this is pretty reasonable. A DV or HDV tape is about 12 gigabytes, so a 500 gig drive can hold about 41 tapes worth of video. This works out to the equivalent of paying about $2.43 per DV tape. Not as cheap as backing up to optical DVD media, but WAY more convenient.

I don't charge my clients for tape since I almost never use tape for acquisition. I charge them $.50 per gig as a storage/archive fee for their entire project. You can only store video on tape, but I can store every asset involved with a project to hard drive. Fifty-cents per gig actually saves them money since I don't have to charge them for tapes nor the time it would take to dump tapes into the computer. Also, if I ever need to go back to a project, it takes just seconds to pop the bare drive into a Thermaltake BlacX docking station. (BTW, Thermaltake just released an eSATA version of this very cool device.)

Anyway, I end up ordering a few 500 gig drives every couple of weeks. It actually costs much less than when I was using tape and it saves an enormous amount of time.

Thanks John,

Do u trafer flash or video camera's HDD data onto this archive HDD or do u archive tape on the 500gb HDD?

Bit

I store everything involved in a project from start to finish to hard drives; the raw unedited footage, audio, video, graphics, .VEG files, finished .AVIs, DVD project files... everything. Also, for some clients, I will clone the hard drive and keep one of them off-site.

That sounds like the ideal compromise to me - the (relatively) easy editability of HDV and the ease of file transfer of solid-state.

I'd be very interested to know which camera(s) can do this.

Mark

bump

John Cline

Does your video camera have a HDD or do u use other media to transfer onto HDD archive??


Bit

"Blink, have you tried the Kodak Preservation DVDs? They're not that much of a premium over the standard fare, under $3 each, with an 80-100year life expectancy."

It's been my experience that what they say on the package GREATLY differs from reality. The dye layer on most of these writable disks starts to fail after quite a short period of time. Why I'm not sure, but sometimes it's simply based on a physical nature. The glue for example holding the layers together gives way and rips the dye layer. Other times it may be due to bad storage (ie: high or low ambient temps).

I've had cheaper disks fail inside of 3 years, and they too included a "100 year" life expectancy clause. The more expensive disks however are much more dependable. I use mostly TY or Verbatim... and Verbatim is mostly my choice since I can easily get double layer inkjet printables. I burn lots of those and I have only had 1 or 2 fail over time.

But none the less, I don't put much faith into optical media... and time.

"500 gig SATA hard drives are about $100, this is pretty reasonable. A DV or HDV tape is about 12 gigabytes, so a 500 gig drive can hold about 41 tapes worth of video."

Yeah.... and these big drives scare the heck out of me. If a tape fails I lose I lose an hour of video. But more often than not, when a drive fails, it fails completely so you end up losing months or even years of data.

But more often than not, when a drive fails, it fails completely so you end up losing months or even years of data.
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One solution that we use is the Western Digital My books, in the 2TB (!) range. They have two hardrives and can be set up as Raid1 for data mirroring. If one harddrive fails, you have the second one to get the data back. You lose have the storage space, but can sleep better.

Of course, if you drop the thing overboard...but the same goes for tapes too!

"these big drives scare the heck out of me" This is way I have copies of each drive and on critical mission video, a number of copies on different media. With DVD media failing more than we all like; when traveling I use a couple of firewire/USB2 external drives and BD media, vs +200DVDs...etc... When 100g BD becomes commerciallyavailable, life will be easier for a few moments. In a year, we'll see 2.5" 1T drives with good seek/write times. BD drives(pc players) are available now for $170, so massive mobile libraries in the field are becoming more realistic.

Personnally, giving the current HDD and Flash disk price lower and lower prices, i would never care to work with tapes. This is a very obsolete technology imho by about any standard.

I would say : invest in some simple backup solution (small portable or ultraportable and portable HD) and forget about tapes...

I will myself get a small Asus eeepc or something like that to transfert everything.



I almost abandonned tapes some years ago and

"Personnally, giving the current HDD and Flash disk price lower and lower prices, i would never care to work with tapes. This is a very obsolete technology imho by about any standard."

Absolutely true. It's an older, slower technology. On the other hand. I'm 46 now and I still have usable cassettes from my early teen days... that's 30 years. Tapes have proven themselves as an archiving media much more so than other methods suggested.

CD's are pretty good at holding up, but then it's slightly different in the respect that the tolerances are much looser than dvd. You can still play a pretty messed up CD.

"Well David, maybe you should click on "Forum Settings" above, under Forum View select "threaded and click on the submit button. Your eyes will be opened for you."

Then that is my mistake; I wasn't aware of that function, and it's not in a place where you'd find it in most message boards.

But, that being the case, looking at the reply tree as it exists, JFJ's post looks even MORE like what I thought it was.

"That's a good one. Didn't know about that advantage. Very useful."

Man, you're going to LOVE being able to delete clips on the fly, and from anywhere on the card . . . :)

"I'm still on tape and will be for as long as I can. I simply don't think you can beat its archiving ability. All my stuff goes on optical media... which I KNOW will fail long before the tape does.

I think HDD's and flash are certainly much more convenient and much faster... but then there's that archiving issue"

If you really want to, you can shoot tapeless and archive to tape.

Am I right to say that the main reason people still prefer tapes is for superior archiving ability??

Bit

"Am I right to say that the main reason people still prefer tapes is for superior archiving ability??

Personally, I wouldn't call it superior. I have had far more old tapes fail than optical media or hard drives. Also, you can only store video on DV/HDV tape, not any of the rest of the project.

The reason I still prefer tapes is the HDV->DV downconversion that Sony offers on their cameras. If you don't need to deliver HD, then you can downconvert to DV as you log and capture, saving you some render time. But you still have an HD master. If you want to back it up to a HDD for a later date, then do that and just reuse your tapes.

Switched to AVCHD because of a Sony CX7 (records to memory stick).

Vegas handles the files just fine, editing AVCHD is slow (even with a quadcore and tons of RAM)

Picture quality is dandy (camera doesn't have x.v. colour though)

Happy? Not really. Now using a HDR-HC9 with HDV and miniDV tapes. MUCH happier with that.