Archive P2 Media on Flash devices?

D

dafilms

Member
Does it makes any sense at all to archive P2 Media on low cost SD or Compact Flash Cards? It seems like you could just copy the data from a 16GB P2 card ($800) to a 16GB CF ($35) or SD card ($35) and the put the cards on the shelf.

I don't really know, but is it likely that Flash storage will prove to be more stable than DVDs over time? I would imagine that transferring data to flash media would be a much faster than burning DVDs as well.

I'm not necessarily trying to advance this idea, so feel free to tell me how bad an idea this really is.

Derek Allen
 
It's not a bad idea at all to be honest. But I think you might find the transfer times and hassle of doing card to card transfers ultimately makes it undesirable. If you want a really robust long term archive solution you want to get an LTO tape drive.

Noah
 
At approximately $2.00 per gig, it seems kinda expensive to me given the other options out there.
 
LTO would be the best, but for some of my new P2 clients its a bit off putting.

Do you think the card to card transfer times would be longer than burning a DVD? How about the transfer times from hard drive to card?
 
I think it's a great idea.


Pros

- I trust solid state memory over anything that spins (regardless of $/gb)
- It really would fit in with the "old school" work flow of handing beta tapes to clients
- Small size of cf and sd cards mean they are easy to store and transport
- A multitude of card readers are readily available and inexpensive
- 30 MB/s transfer rate would give you 8gb transfer in under 8 minutes (8gb 30mb/s cards are about $50)

Cons
- more expensive per gb than hard drives (and LTO? - I don't know the prices for LTO)
- only fast enough for storage, no ability to work from the cards
- small size means tiny labels

I have already talked with a client about this and we will be trying it out on a shoot next week.

You really only need the really fast transfer speeds if you are doing this during production. If you are doing the transfer after the fact (once you have finished post) you can use lower cost, slower cards. You would still need a way to verify the files, and if you need to get back to the footage you would have longer transfer times, but I imagine that wouldn't be necessary often.
 
Quicklad-

Have you tested yet? Are your sure you can't work off the SD/CF cards? I guess I would mainly want to be able to preview footage using P2CMS and import from the SD/CF card to FCP using Log and transfer.

An ideal workflow in the field would be to offload the P2 card to both and hard drive and whatever flash device. The client could walk away with either the hard drive, Flash media or both. Store the flash media as an archive and use the drive for the edit.

At the end of the day, My work is done, the client has a HD with data on it to edit and a physical piece of media as a backup.
 
Derek,
Out of similiar curisity, I once downloaded a nearly full 16gb P2 card to a 16gb class 6 sdhc card via usb 2.0/HD Log on a G4 Powerbook and it took over an hour. I could playback the clips fine thru HD Log, but I never got around to L&T on FCP.
I assume a full 16gb P2 card could fit onto an empty 16gb sdhc card. The sdhc card cost about $25. Dealbreaker for me was the lengthy download time. Maybe a FW800 card reader would be faster than usb2.0 on a speedier macbook pro?
It currently takes me about 15min to download to a hard drive, or a gb/min. leaving me more time to play after work.

chris
 
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We recently did a 16GB commercial shoot and used P2Genie to transfer to a Seagate FAPro (USB2) and a USB thumb drive for the end-client. The thumb drive took almost 25 minutes, compared to the FAPro at less than 7 minutes.

The solid-state card storage will become better over time, but the transfer times are very slow at the moment for off-the-shelf consumer storage solutions.

The thumb drive did play back in full-screen on the Mac notebook via P2CMS, which surprised me. It won't do so on the Toshiba we used to transfer the footage.

e
 
A Class 6 card is rated to sustain data transfer of 6 megabytes per second of write speed. At that rate, yeah, backing up a 16GB card should take a minimum of 45 minutes in the best possible case.
 
What about the HVX200's "Host mode" function for CF/SD?

As the FireStore FS100 is a battery-powered FireWire hard drive, maybe a similar unit can be made that replaces the hard drive with a removable flash media.

It's been a while since I checked out the FireStore device. Any thoughts?

-Andrew
 
Well, if it takes an hour to taransfer a 16gb card to SD, that kills the idea of creating an archive copy in the field. Although, the fact that once it is on a Flash device the playback works is encouraging. Occasionally, an out of town client asks me to shoot something and then send them the drive. I could just dump to a couple of USB stick and ship them without the worry of trying to get a Hard Drive back.
 
Hard disks are a lot cheaper per gigabyte than USB sticks though. I bought a bunch of 320GB drives for $80. They're incredibly cheaper than tape. We've been treating external hard disks as our client deliverables for years, and I'm not worried about getting them back.

Yes you could deliver footage on USB sticks. But wouldn't a hard drive be faster, cheaper, simpler, and easier?
 
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