3D Waveletts

I

im.thatoneguy

Well-known member
Hey Graeme. We're going to need to compress and store our footage for archival purposes. Any chance we could get a 3D RAW Wavelett compression option for Interframe Wavelett compression?

While on one hand I'm not anxious to further comrpess any of my data, if I'm just archiving footage that isn't being rendered out in RGB for my Online conform, I probably won't need it in perfect quality either. It would of course require quite a bit of RAM depending on the 3D pixel depth but, with a reasonable GOP it could work out I presume?

Just a thought.
 
I was thinking for archives, that you'd want perfect lossless quality? I certainly wasn't thinking of moving away from the I-Frame approach.

Graeme
 
A 500 GB hard drive is now less than $200. That gives you 4 hr 49 min of Redcode at 27.5 MB/sec.
 
You don't want to archive to a hard drive. I think LTO decks seem like the best option for archiving big data files. At a price of 3,000 for an LTO3 deck it seems that you'll make your money back by not having to keep buying drives.
 
LTO may be the best option for archiving, I have no experience with that myself. At various times I have used QIC tape, CD, DVD and HDD andof those, hard drives were significantly more reliable.

It used to be that hard drives sitting on the shelf could fail to spin up due to the head getting stuck to the disc ("stiction"), but current designs have a "head parking ramp" that lifts the head off the disc at spindown. I suppose the hub bearing could seize but I haven't seen that yet.
 
another advantadge of LTO-3 is that it can transfer at about 80-90 MB/s considerably faster than a single HD. Also just got the Dell LTO-3 drive to work on a G5 using retrospect so you can get 4 TB and a deck for 3500.
 
LTO-3 media is cheaper per gigabyte than buying hard drives right now, but removable media has serious disadvantages. Notably, using hard drives lets you easily keep pace with advancing technology. Right now, hard drive space (500 GB drives) is about $0.40/GB/ Next year, if history is any guide, it'll probably be $0.20/GB. A year after that, $0.10/GB.

Tape media tends not to drop in price so fast, so tape drive formats are competitive when first introduced, but tend to become less competitive later in their life cycles. Then you have no choice but to move to a new tape format. After some years of this, instead of having a bunch of hard drives that all plug into the same interface (hard drive interfaces don't have to change often, since internal tech advances don't require the external interface to change), you've got tapes in three different formats and three different tape drives kicking around (though LTO drives are usually backwards compatible, so two of them are sitting in the closet).
 
But archival is supposed to actually LAST... I'm not talking about 10 years, but 100! At least 50.

I don't trust HDs to last that long. In fact I have had several HD failures in my last 5 years of computing not to want to leave my raw footage on them...
 
I've seen discussions on the archival properties of media on many different bulletin boards and mailing lists, and read a number of technical papers. Anecdotally, almost any media *can* last decades, likewise most any media *can* fail in a year or two. It's often hard to find a specific cause for the longevity or lack thereof.

I can't find the survey that reported this right now, but what I remember is the big corporations, banks etc. that are required to keep long term records do not trust any media long-term. They simply re-record their data every few years.
 
Rerecording is the way to go. You really can't trust any media. If rerecording was for some reason impossible, I'd back everything up in three different formats and hope one of them lasted, but clearly this is rather impractical for most applications.

Rerecording also makes sense for another reason, though.

Storage capacity is practically doubling every year. This makes the notion of long-term offline "archiving" a little pointless. Let's say you back up 5 terabytes worth of data to 10 500 GB hard drives today, and you stick them in your closet. In 10 years, you'll have a hundred terabytes or more of active storage on your desktop. Think I'm crazy? We've gone from 3 GB drives to 750 GB drives in the last 10 years, at about the same price. At that rate, by late 2016, $400 will buy you 183 terabytes of storage.

When you have that much active storage, it won't make any sense to have a bunch a tiny hard drives or tapes or whatever from 2006 sitting around in your closet. You'll just copy the data off of them. Even if you don't want to move that data to your active storage, you'll probably still want to move it (along with a lot of other stuff) to a more reliable and much more dense backup format (holographic discs or whatever).
 
Stephen Williams said:
Chris,

Film RGB seperations should last 500 years.

Stephen
Click to expand...

At what price though? Probably the best option for a high value original or for a large company but I suspect that would not be economically viable for most of us. I reckon you are better off backing up to bare hardrives. Back up a dupe copy, store in 2 separate locations, spin the disks up at least once every 6 months and plan to copy those disks to new media in a 3-5 years time. At the moment 250gb disks are under $100 so this is not a huge cost and the ongoing maintenance wouldn't be too onerous.

Martin
 
Yeah but how many of us actually need our data backed up?

I wouldn't shed a tear if most of my projects were lost to the great digital chasm. And the ones I do care about, are on a dozen DVDs spread across 4 states. Which was the original point of this thread: a slightly more lossy format so that our useless dailies can be saved without quite the pain, but still in a form that *could* be used if for some unforseen reason, an extended cut is needed a year later.
 
And although it's slightly off topic, remember in the future NOT to archive to a format that uses DRM in any way, as it may not be decryptable when you want it back 20 years later.... caveat emptor!
 
LTO3 on Mac

LTO3 on Mac

Jeff Brue said:
another advantadge of LTO-3 is that it can transfer at about 80-90 MB/s considerably faster than a single HD. Also just got the Dell LTO-3 drive to work on a G5 using retrospect so you can get 4 TB and a deck for 3500.
Click to expand...

We've jumped onto the Dell 132T LTO3 solution as well. Two internal drives and room for 24 LTO3 tapes. Rough calculation is a 9,6 TB capacity.

Question is: Which SCSI card for G5 Mac supports the UltraSCSI 2 standard ?
And which PCI Express card does the same for the Intel Macs ?

Steen Dongo

PICTUREWISE COMMUNICATION
Denmark
 
Stephen Williams said:
Chris,

Film RGB seperations should last 500 years.

Stephen
Click to expand...

Sure, but if you're acquiring digitally, this is a lossy process.

Actually, I guess you could use a film recorder in conjunction with some clever software to back up digital data to black and white film as optical patterns. Wonder what kind of data density you could get this way.
 
You must log in or register to reply here.
Back
Top