Archiving tapeless footage

MisterCat

MisterCat

Well-known member
Been thinking of upgrading from my DVX to HVX for all the obvious reasons. Another guy at my work just bought a new Sony HD camera and says he has friends in LA that love the HVX's they use, but he was concerned about archiving. Mostly he's paranoid that drives will fail and his archive will be lost. Hence, he stuck with tape.

So, my general question, out of ignorance, is what is the preferred method of archiving without tape involved? Seems like you just go through drives like tissue? Any other choice?

Along those lines, are many people using DV Rack (OnLocation now, right?) Seems like a much cheaper alternative than those expensive cards, which you need to dump constantly into another drive anyway. But in my ignorance of this, I may not know all the story.

thx
steven
 
Dual layer DVD's are perfect for the 8gig cards.

I was beta testing DVRack and loved it. Fantastic tool on location and in our studio!
Suddenly it went by-by. I haven't purchased the "new" version yet, but will likely at some point if it doesn't get dumbed down.
The down side is being teathered to the laptop which works sometimes and other times doesn't.
 
i just dump everything to external drive modules and shelve them. not really any different than tape really... i dont know what al the archiving fuss is about with the tapeless workflow...
 
DV Rack is a good tool, though their activation issues in the last round(as they were selling out to Adobe) make them villains in my eyes. The product became virtually unusable because I could not update with new patches, etc. And the support was basically non-existent. That said, DV Rack is good for the monitor and scopes. But I quit recording with it because I prefer to work with the MXF files via Raylight. Besides, in the end after shooting on the HVX for half a year now, I think shooting to P2 is just easier than being tethered. The time it takes to dump cards has been negligible, even in time critical situations like a recent semi-pro soccer game we shot.

Right now, my workflow consists of two external drives for each client, one for the main drive, one for back up. I use an external enclosure to access them, so that it's cheaper to buy the drives. But I am now looking at Tape backup systems (not video tape) but data tape backups like they use in enterprise computing environments. This is what these tape backups are for, for archiving digital data. But I have not settled on one yet. I'm not a fan of long term archiving on drives, because they are so fragile. You can drop a drive once and it can die. You can drop the archive tapes I'm talking about many times without damaging them. But they are for ARCHIVE purposes, because they are slow to access.
 
Thanks for the replies. I'll keep watching and researching until I have the dollars to make the change!
 
For added longevity, if you are HD-based, you may want to check out a 70gb REV drive.

The "Disk cartidges" are essentially HD platters without the heads attached that can muck it up. They're sealed to last 30years properly stored.

That's what I'm planning on doing for my more important projects. It's much cheaper than tape backup.
 
I've looked all around and finally settled on our solution, keep in mind we're a bit bigger, and we need to have access to all our footage forever.

We're going all FCP so we're installing an xserve with xraid. This will basically be a file server that we archive everything to. Our enterprise tape backup system (run by IT) will then back it up every 2 weeks or so.

Eventually we'll put Final Cut Server on it to help manage the files. That's our solution.

If I don't get the money for that we'll just go rev because they are made to archive, as opposed to removable HDD.
 
At this point in time, for my documentary, I keep all footage on two hard drives, and two DVD-ROMs, and I use 4gb cards. As I cull out footage into sequences, I store THAT on two OTHER hard drives.

And yes, this adds up.
 
Depends if you have the capital to invest in faster, bigger solution...but I know several people that went the route of Quantum SDLTA or new LTO3A tape backups. Big advantage is speed and capacity per tape. You can write & read up to 3x play speed--that's 3 times faster than on disk.

cost per gig is pretty low, but the decks are like $5-7k. if you want more info ask Imagine Products--they have software that works with them and also sell the Q drives. many Panny dealers also carry the Q drives...
 
Has anyone used REV cartridges to dump their P2 thru laptop in the field? Would this be as fast and safer than an external drive?
 
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