Okay. What are we looking at for hard drives?

lpcvideo1 said:
I have often wished they would make an archival DVCPRO HD deck as well. Is that even possible? Something beastly slow and cheap?
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Its not exactly a DVCPRO deck, but I just ordered a 7000 series DLT drive on ebay for 50 bucks. That'll store 35 minutes of 1080i/P DVCPROHD per tape, which isn't too shabby. One or two tapes should hold a typical project. Tapes are about 30-35 bucks a pop and last many years.

By the way, DLT drives with 160 Gig capacity are in the $800-1000 range. Tapes typically only run 40-50 bucks.

And before someone jumps in with the old "oh but if you get your tapes near a magnet" complaint, I'd like to point out that we've been storing videos on backup tapes for many years already despite this horrible "danger". We call them miniDV tapes, and they're not nearly as robust as DLT tapes...

www.philipwilliams.com
 
Hd Vtr

Hd Vtr

Maybe Panasonic will release a cheaper HD VTR at NAB? I really don't trust hard drives for archiving. On average, I've had more hard drives fail on me than tapes. There's too many working parts to trust a hard drive like that.

Also, there's something to be said for making quick dubs from machine to machine. It's easier to just grab a tape and make a dub for a client than to fire up a computer, plug up a hard drive, open the project, blah, blah, blah.

JVC has a good deck to compliment the HD100. Panasonic needs something similar or their P2 workflow reaches an expensive bottleneck towards the end.
 
You all should check out some LTO-2 Drives

Dell has a great deal right now for a LTO-2 Drive $1,500
30 Year shelf life. 200/400GB for $36

http://www1.us.dell.com/content/products/productdetails.aspx/pvaul_110tlto2l?c=us&cs=04&l=en&s=bsd

Works out to cost you $4.5 per 1 hour of DVCPRO HD 720 24pN!!! If we can use the 2:1 compression on our video files it should work out to cost $2.50 per hour of HD.
I am going to add this to my server and be able to offload my HD/SD projects and files for safe keeping! Talk about fast, the LTO-2 drive from Dell does 86GB per hour!

You will wnat to keep an eye out for LTO-2 & LTO-3 drives to drop in price this year when LTO-4 comes out.
Gen 3 will give you 400/800GB on a $80 tape. Problem is that most LTO-3 drives right now cost $3600!

I feel that over time, this LTO-2 drive will pay for its self as I won't have to keep buying more and more "intermediate" backup options such as DVDs HD-DVDs or normal hard disks. All I got to do is keep $40 tapes around and archive for like 10 years before investing in a media refresh solution.

Remember, these are the types of drives large companies use and depend on!
 
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Okay. I just bit the bullet and ordered a G-Tech GRAID PRO 2.5TB drive. With taxes and delivery fees 4,100.00.

That's half of what I was going to pay for a Medea Ultra 320 and it's got RAID 3 protection!

I am broke but content.
 
BollingerPro said:
<snip>If we can use the 2:1 compression on our video files it should work out to cost $2.50 per hour of HD.<snip>
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When working with video and tape backups, make all your calculations based on native storage. Video files are generally as compressed as they're going to get, so you will not see anything near 2:1 compression on tape.. To see this in action, just use Winzip to compress a video file.
 
HowdyDoo said:
Maybe Panasonic will release a cheaper HD VTR at NAB?
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I find that unlikely, because DVCProHD tape drive mechanisms are not cheap. That's one of the main reasons why the HVX is 10x cheaper than Varicam, because they didn't have to put a tape drive into the HVX.

The cheapest DVCProHD VTR (the AJ-HD1200A) is around $19,000.
 
R Gale said:
I find that unlikely, because DVCProHD tape drive mechanisms are not cheap.
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Then Panasonic needs to figure something out. I believe the archiving issue is a serious bottleneck in the P2 workflow. It really limits you to small projects. I suppose for now, tape drives are in fact the safest and the most economical option. However, when you want to access something quickly for duplication, it's always a major pain to have to reconstruct a project through tape drives.

Until Panasonic releases a prosumer VTR (or viable archiving option), the appeal of a tapeless system just disappeared for me. Yes there are many wonderful positive things about it, but at the end of the day I don't want to keep throwing down money for cheap, unreliable hard drives just to store my masters.
 
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I talked to one of my "IT" Friends.

He was telling me that I could very well get 2:1 on a LTO-2 tape because of this...The LTO-2 drive will just put more data on the tape per inch, sort of like shooting DV in LP mode. It won't really change my mind about buying a LTO-2 Drive but man it would be sure nice if it worked in 2:1!

Wonder if someone, that has a LTO-2 drive, could test this for us that don't?
 
Has anyone had good experiences with Firmtek? This is what I'm looking at doing for my P2 storage/editing. I've got a G5 w/ PCI-X. I've been looking to get the Firmtek bundle with External Enclosure and 2-Port Sata Host Adapter below.

http://store.yahoo.com/firmtek/sata1sen2.html

For $260, it seems like a good deal and all I'd have to do is buy some SATA drives. Tigerdirect has a deal going on for 250 gig Seagates at $79.99. Am I missing something here/ Some component/hardware that I'm forgetting?

They also have a four-bay bundle for $630 w/ 4 Port Sata host card.
 
Geoff_R said:
Has anyone had good experiences with Firmtek? This is what I'm looking at doing for my P2 storage/editing. I've got a G5 w/ PCI-X. I've been looking to get the Firmtek bundle with External Enclosure and 2-Port Sata Host Adapter below.

http://store.yahoo.com/firmtek/sata1sen2.html

For $260, it seems like a good deal and all I'd have to do is buy some SATA drives. Tigerdirect has a deal going on for 250 gig Seagates at $79.99. Am I missing something here/ Some component/hardware that I'm forgetting?

They also have a four-bay bundle for $630 w/ 4 Port Sata host card.
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Firmtek is probably who I will go with for my RAID setup. The company was founded by former Apple engineers so it would seem they know their stuff. Good products with a good price...can't go wrong. Plus, having hot swappable drives and the ability to expand when needed is priceless.
 
I think I'm just going to transfer all my footage to 35mm and store the negative cans in my fridge...
 
I must say, it seems that acquisition is the most popular subject discussed in HD forums. I can't help but think that when it comes to delivering masters and archiving, there are significant hurdles to overcome. I really want to buy an HVX right now. BADLY. But I don't want to tie myself to 10k worth of hidden post production expenses that I wasn't ready for.

If anybody has a cost effective and reliable system for archiving HVX footage, post away!

Oddly enough, with the current state of things I am reminded of when Sony introduced the VX1000 with a firewire port, years before computers began using them. I remember editing with a Radius Edit DV card (the first Mac DV editing package). It was so nice when all the technology came together and for the first time in my life, I was able to actually buy a complete post studio and keep it in my bedroom. I bought a Powermac 9500 and two 9 GB drives. DV has been a great ride and I don't think it's quite over yet simply because it's so dang cost effective. Thanks to DV, I have been able to shoot commercials like crazy with virtually no overhead expenses. Heck, over the past five years, one local commercial gig has often covered an entire DV camera and a 250 GB harddrive.

I wish someone could snap their fingers and push the HD world forwards a year or two. I'm fine with bugs and kinks in developing technology. I can deal with that. But right now HD is missing some key COMPONENTS to make it work efficiently.
 
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Okay, let's look at archiving and workflow. here's what I plan to do:

I just bought a Maxtor 200 Gig firewire drive at Fry's for 190 bucks.

At most, DVCPRO HD at 1080 24p is about a Gig a minute, so the Maxtor will hold probably 150 minutes of footage (because hard drives never actually the storage space they claim to have). Maybe as little as 100 minutes. Let's say that 200 Gigs will hold 120 minutes of footage. That's safe, I think.

You shoot your stuff and just like the big boys, you keep a camera record with all the shots you take (I plan on deleting bad takes as I go to save space - you can't do that with film).

As you shoot, you store the stuff from your P2 Cards on a P2Store or onto a hard drive with a laptop or one of the firewire drives coming out soon.

Then, you go home and put the footage on your hard drive and each card, as if it was a film magazine, is stored in a seperate folder.

You pull out your Maxtor 180 Gig firewire drive, drag the folders onto it until it's full, Xerox the camera report, put the Maxtor drive back in it's box with the copy of the shot list in the box with the drive, label the box and put it in your closet. Viola! You are archived.
 
I don't know, but archiving to external firewire\usb disks doens't seem sensible to me, though it may work for some, stacking external disks doesn't seem right and is space consuming. As for the 2 year longevity of DVD-R's I will have to politely disagree and reassure that they surely last much longer than that. I have had DVD-R stacked without cover, one over ther other for more than 2 years and they still work just fine. I have had issues with DVD-R's but they were either a bad brand, a bad burn, or hugely mistreated with scratches all over the place. Actually most of the issues I've had with DVD's are with re-writables not recordables.

My view is that Blu-Ray\HD-DVD's are going to be the most economically feasible and sensible approach to video archiving.
 
BigMike said:
You shoot your stuff and just like the big boys, you keep a camera record with all the shots you take (I plan on deleting bad takes as I go to save space - you can't do that with film).

As you shoot, you store the stuff from your P2 Cards on a P2Store or onto a hard drive with a laptop or one of the firewire drives coming out soon.

Then, you go home and put the footage on your hard drive and each card, as if it was a film magazine, is stored in a seperate folder.

You pull out your Maxtor 180 Gig firewire drive, drag the folders onto it until it's full, Xerox the camera report, put the Maxtor drive back in it's box with the copy of the shot list in the box with the drive, label the box and put it in your closet. Viola! You are archived.
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This is my plan too. As an additional measure, you can burn the contents of each 4Gig P2 folder onto a DVD-R, and keep the discs stored in a separate location. Takes time, but it's an inexpensive way to have a 2nd backup. Really a must on bigger projects, features etc.

Of course this will be a lot easier to do once BluRay and HD-DVD's come out.
 
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I think BigMike has about the most cost effective solution right now. HD's are cheap, around $0.40 a GB.

Unfortunately, platter based HD's are limited to around 500GB in their current form. There are hard drive technologies on the near horizon(4 years) that promise 1.2 petabytes(1200TB) of storage for $750 the size of a deck of cards. If my math is right, that's over 20,000 hours of 1080 24p.

Until then, it's editing off a 1TB array and archiving to firewire/usb HD's.
 
Backing up to firewire drive AND a DVD-R seems like the safest option by far. It is also the quickest way to access old footage. However, it certainly isn't cheap.

I just bought a Maxtor 200 Gig firewire drive at Fry's for 190 bucks.
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Spending $190 for every 2 hours of footage will break the bank for many. Maybe purchasing some extremely cheap internal ATA drives just for storage purposes would be better. There's a great device by BYTECC that is simply a cable that connects ATA drives to your USB 2.0 port with no enclosure. You can store the drive in its anti static sleeve and keep it in the box.

http://eshop.macsales.com/Item_Specials.cfm?ID=7426&Item=OWCUSB2ATA

http://www.byteccusa.com/product/adapter/BT-200.htm

Normally I am against hard drives as an archiving method. I have had too many drives fail on me (more than tape). But archiving to DVD-R as an added measure would make hard drives feel a lot safer. I personally don't trust either of those formats individually, but together, it could work.

It just won't be cheap. I suppose if you use the USB cable to cut the cost of an enclosure, you can cut it down to $50 for every 60 minutes.
 
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