How Are People Delivering Footage & Archiving

David Saraceno

David Saraceno

Moderator
Staff member
These are workflow questions obviously.

One shooter shot 55 Gbs the other day. How did he deliver the footage to the client.

Second question: blu ray and HD DVD still aren't here.

How are people today archiving the footage?

Say I shoot a whole bunch of stock HD footage with the cam, and want to keep it for future use.

What's the current workflow? Removable drives or what?
 
I've been backing up my P2 folders onto my raid, and also backed up the converted QT movies as well (most people wouldnt do double redundancy)
 
For right now, I'm planning on backing up to dual-layer DVD. Clips that are too big to fit, I've got an external 500GB drive that's gonna get full fast...I'll probably buy two more over the next couple months and hope that the blu ray or HD DVD comes out soon.
 
I am currently looking at getting a Tape Drive, one that holds 400GB and the media cost $50 or less. This will most likely be the best solution out there becasue DVDs are prone to fail and be unreadable within 2 years or less in some cases.

Hard Drives, are great only if they are in a Raid Array. Raid 1 is cheaper than Raid 5 in most cases.


LTO and DLT tapes have a shelf life of over 15 years and btw THEY ARE Fast, some can write to the tape at over 100GB per hour.
I would suggest you all look into them becasue cost per GB is going to be a real issue really soon for some of you.
 
BollingerPro said:
I am currently looking at getting a Tape Drive, one that holds 400GB and the media cost $50 or less. This will most likely be the best solution out there becasue DVDs are prone to fail and be unreadable within 2 years or less in some cases.

Hard Drives, are great only if they are in a Raid Array. Raid 1 is cheaper than Raid 5 in most cases.


LTO and DLT tapes have a shelf life of over 15 years and btw THEY ARE Fast, some can write to the tape at over 100GB per hour.
I would suggest you all look into them becasue cost per GB is going to be a real issue really soon for some of you.
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Very good advice.
 
David S. said:
The first question:

Again, how do you deliver footage to a client?
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like anything else. Depends on the client. If your talking RAW, then DVD, or my fav, firewire HD.
Most of my clients only recieve finished product, not masters.
 
i'm sticking with SD till all this delivery mess gets taken care of, I like new technology but i'm not willing to be a test monkey. I've already had issues with the Sony FX1 when it first came out, what a pain in the friggin ass, never again.

oh yah..and yes most clients shold jsut get the final product, if htey want all the other garbage tell them to buy you some harddrives and copy that $hit over for em lol
 
esperman said:
like anything else. Depends on the client. If your talking RAW, then DVD, or my fav, firewire HD.
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The hard drive then is downloaded to the client's computer for what purpose?

Again, in the past we provided footage that was played on a tape. I understand that you're not going to provide a p2 card, but if this is for a broadcast commercial, for example, is it played off the hard drive, or converted into what?
 
Maybe the reason that my fear is so much less than some others is because I've been working with a computer animation artist for years that has never had a problem going down to his local pro video dealer with his laptop and outputting to whatever tape format he needs. The cost of the tape plus a few bucks to use the decks.

Although, given the cost of HD format tapes (HDCAM and DVCPRO HD), it's about the same price or less expensive just to buy a Firewire hard drive that the client can plug into anything.
 
David S. said:
The first question:

Again, how do you deliver footage to a client?
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Send a PM to Evinsky and ask him directly; I don't know whether he'll see this thread or not.

Right now we just deliver hard disks to the client or to the edit facility. I believe Evin (Evinsky) said that he's delivered hard disks to multiple clients, they love it.
 
David S. said:
The hard drive then is downloaded to the client's computer for what purpose?
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For whatever purpose they want. Are they editing the footage? If so, give them the raw data. I assumed that was what you were talking about.


Again, in the past we provided footage that was played on a tape.
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Yes, that's the way it used to be done. But in the past, it used to be BetaSP, and BetaSP was a standard that everyone had and everyone used and it all worked and it all made sense. Now you've got such a splintered and fragmented tape market, with three basically-incompatible HDV formats, DigiBeta, BetaSX, MPEG-IMX, DV, DVCAM, DVCPRO, DVCPRO50, DVCPRO-HD, HDCAM, and who knows how many I've forgotten here -- it's a confusing mess and delivering a "tape" is no longer the universal format it used to be. Shooting format and deliverable format are not in any way guaranteed to be the same anymore! You have to be darn sure that the client or the editing facility has the same type of equipment you have, or you can't deliver them something they can use.

Whereas with P2/hard-disk, you can deliver a hard drive that can work on any PC or Mac computer. No need for a deck that handles any specific type of tape. As long as the edit facility has an Avid or FCP suite (and is there any post facility in the country that doesn't have at least one Avid or FCP suite?) then you're good to go.

but if this is for a broadcast commercial, for example, is it played off the hard drive, or converted into what?
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Well if you're not talking about raw footage, and are instead talking about finished footage, then you deliver it in whatever medium they're expecting to receive. Which may mean dubbing it to DigiBeta or DV50 or even BetaSP. It all depends on what they specify the deliverables to be.

Things are changing and changing rapidly. Every major manufacturer is now offering a tapeless solution. Only Sony's requires someone to buy an expensive player (for XDCAM); otherwise everyone else is using hard disks or PCMCIA-compatible flash cards or common compactflash or SD memory cards which are universally available and easy to work with.
 
I don't know much about the Iomega Rev. But I noticed 35GB disks are $50. Thats over a dollar a gigabyte (apparently you can compress them for better storage capacities). I just bought a 400gb USB 2.0/Firewire drive for about $270. That is well below a dollar a gigabyte. Thats why I wouldn't switch to the Iomega Rev as a storage solution. But maybe I missed something...
 
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