Archive Directory Software

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stew75

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I just recently started working at a facility that has over 1,000 Beta tapes of old programing. Our current plan is to take the programs and raw footage and compress it to 422 and then put it on BluRay disc for storage. I know alot of people will say Beta is the best to archive with, but first let me explain.

There are several reason's for this:

Limited Space - We are literally boxing ourselves in with Beta tapes.

Organization - Currently the tapes are loosely organized so it becomes an event to actually find something on one of them.

Outdated - Most of the stuff is SD and VERY dated. We merely need to be able to retrieve it in the off chance we need it for something down the road.

Our shop is now tapeless and HD only. So we are currently getting new footage when needed. What I'm looking for is Software that will make it easy for me to tag or search out Disc. So for example, If I needed a program I could type in the date it was shot or the title and a list would be generated of possible matches, so I knew where to look. I understand I would have to put that information in as I tagged the Disc contents in the software.

Does anyone have any suggestions or ideas for me on implementing this? And the reason I posted this in FCP, is because we are Mac based and use FCP to import the tapes, and Compressor to compress to ProRes. I wold appreciate any suggestions. Thank you for your time!
 
Something else to think about is the time and expense involved with archiving this standard definition footage that you will in all likelihood never use.

For example... Say you have 1000 1-hour Beta SP tapes that need to be archived.

Using a normal work day as a model, it will take you 125 days just to ingest the footage. And at a pay rate of say $15.00 an hour for the person doing the digitizing, that comes out to $15,000 in labor just for the ingest.

If you were to use the ProRes 422LT NTSC codec you could fit 3 hours on a single 50Gig dual layer BluRay disc, at a cost of around $2500 for the 333 blank discs needed.

At 3 hours each to burn and finalize a 50 GB BluRay disc, you have added another 1000 hours of time, which equates to $15,000 using the earlier employee model.

We are at $32,500 and we have yet to spend any time on Metadata/cataloging/database.

Realistically you are looking at around a whole year to knockout a project like that.

All the Best!

Dave
 
David W. Jones said:
...1000 1-hour Beta SP tapes...3 hours each to burn and finalize a 50 GB BluRay disc you have added another 1000 hours of time, which equates to $15,000 using the earlier employee model.

We are at $32,500 and we have yet to spend any time on Metadata/cataloging/database.
Click to expand...
Your employee/workflow model: One FCP station, one Betacam SP deck, one hour of content per tape and one employee working eight hour days. Of that 8 hour day nearly 4 hours are wasted waiting on the digitizing to finish and waiting on the burn to finalize. What is that $15/hour employee doing during the down time? Checking their Facebook page ? The employee could use that time to catalog the footage being archived.

Doing any sort of cost/benefit analysis is irrelevant without critical information as a starting point.

What's on the tapes? The footage could be hours of legal depositions (boring stuff). But a legal team might place a high value of preserving those assets in the event that they are needed in the future.

How long are the tapes? If the tapes are only 5 minutes each it drives the costs down significantly.

Archiving legacy material is time consuming and can be expensive.
Is it worth the money and the time?
Only the content owner can determine the value of archiving.

With tape based material the only certainty is that the material will eventually be lost if you do nothing. The binders age and the tape breaks down altogether. Add to that the difficulty of finding a working Betacam SP deck 20 years from now.
 
Thanks for all of your help! The CatDV software is exactly what I'm looking for.

I work for a government agency, so we cannot get rid of old footage incase its needed for something official later on down the road. However I agree that the odds are slim to none of that happening, but we have to be safe just incase.

I will be doing this stuff when I have free time around the office, so no employees will need to be hired for it. There is no critical time table either. I just want to regain some of the space back in my office and we are only shooting digital now.

All the programs vary in length Some of it is full 1 hour tapes of RAW camera footage and some are 5 minute cut programs.

Thanks again for all of your help!
 
Archiving to BD is a bad idea. It's not an archival format, the disc can get scratched, they are not durable, and IMO BluRay is the last of the physical disc medias as the world moves to ubiquitous digital streaming.

I think that buying a few 2TB drives, using them as your backup destinations, and storing the drives in multiple locations for redundancy is your best, cheapest, and fastest way to archive anything these days.

Honestly, burning stuff to Blu-Ray as a long term backup solution is madness.
 
@Phil1076 - That was my first thought as well and we still may do that. We just would need to make duplicates of the drives for safety. The reason we were thinking bluray is that they would never be accessed again unless it was needed for something (which is unlikely). Also we would have them in storage cases to protect them.

At this point how we store them isn't my concern only the software to let me know where everything is! So if anyone knows of any other progams like CATDV please send them my way! Thanks again for your time.
 
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