Could LTO tapes be used as a video tape format?

roxics

roxics

Veteran
What I mean is a live recording format. I know you can store video files on them, but could it be used as something like a VHS tape or DVCAM tape?
I know current machines probably can't, but could the technology in general be repurposed for this?
 
LTO tapes operate in a repeated forward and reverse manner. To oversimplify a little, a track is recorded from one end of the tape to the other, then the recording head mechanically moves down a bit and the tape reverses direction to record the next track back towards the beginning. The constant physical starting, stopping and reversing of the tape makes it just about impossible to record any continuous stream of data like video (you'd need enormous memory buffers to cache the data while the tape was changing tracks), although it is no problem for storing static files.

So I'd say, no, especially when there are so many other technologically easier alternatives.

More details at https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Linear_Tape-Open

- Greg
 
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I'm just trying to figure out if there could be a 4K raw tape format developed. If it was possible. Something you put in a camera. Since tape is generally inexpensive and good for archival.
 
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For all intents and purposes, tape is dead for video production at the acquisition level and I would question whether it could even be considered economical at the 4K level at the data rates that would be required. Even if they could adapt tape "formats" that already exist(DVCPro/HDCam, etc.) and move the tape fast enough, the record times would be a fraction of what we got back then and even less than what most of us are used to with solid state media. Plus the economics of using a tape once vs. 1,000's of cycles on solid state media. Not to mention the delicate and expensive tape transport in the camera. The only thing tape really has going for it is it's ease of archiving and just being able to hand it off. I don't miss shooting on tape one teeny tiny little bit. Especially not anywhere with any real humidity. It's not fun telling a producer we can't shoot right now, because the camera shut down and locked the tape deck up for safety, because of the humidity. Or even worse, it not locking up and getting back and the footage is F'd up because of the humidity/condensation on the heads.

Something like LTO tape for longterm archiving is fine(and probably MUCH better than HDD's), but there is really no reason to ever go back to tape for acquisition.
 
Thanks. But this is purely a hypothetical scenario.

The scenario is this. You have to send back (in time) a high quality video format to sometime between 1920-1950. Your choice when. The earlier you send it back, the more content will be generated on that format. The later you wait, the less content will be generated on that format but the higher the likelihood that people will be able to reverse engineer the technology and duplicate it.

The format should be something good enough to replace film. Since there is a high likelihood people will chose to shoot on this format instead of film.

You are allowed to send back some kind of camera, player, display and recording media. These will appear in every home in America back then.
The things you send back need to be real or some kind of combination of technology that already exists today.

Keep in mind the internet does not exist back then. Your goal is to create both a professional format and a home video format.

This is why I chose tape. I figure it's probably the easiest physical media format for people back then to reverse engineer. Since they have magnetic tape back then. But my goal was to try and get the highest quality tape format I could find.
If LTO tape isn't the right technology for that, then my next choice might be some kind of 4K camera that records to D-VHS tape using an H.265 chipset. I don't know.

This is what I do when stuck and home and bored because of what's going on outside. lol
 
I am under the impression that when you finish editing a project you want to archive, print the most essential projects and footage to film. Most motion picture archival methods don't go beyond 50years. Requires a lot of maintenance to archive the recent history of motion images.

If in your thoughts during this time figure out a better archival method, that is both robust and easily watched with almost any tech, then I'd be very interested in your thoughts.
 
roxics said:
Thanks. But this is purely a hypothetical scenario.

The scenario is this. You have to send back (in time) a high quality video format to sometime between 1920-1950. Your choice when. The earlier you send it back, the more content will be generated on that format. The later you wait, the less content will be generated on that format but the higher the likelihood that people will be able to reverse engineer the technology and duplicate it.

The format should be something good enough to replace film. Since there is a high likelihood people will chose to shoot on this format instead of film.

You are allowed to send back some kind of camera, player, display and recording media. These will appear in every home in America back then.
The things you send back need to be real or some kind of combination of technology that already exists today.

Keep in mind the internet does not exist back then. Your goal is to create both a professional format and a home video format.

This is why I chose tape. I figure it's probably the easiest physical media format for people back then to reverse engineer. Since they have magnetic tape back then. But my goal was to try and get the highest quality tape format I could find.
If LTO tape isn't the right technology for that, then my next choice might be some kind of 4K camera that records to D-VHS tape using an H.265 chipset. I don't know.

This is what I do when stuck and home and bored because of what's going on outside. lol
Click to expand...

Okay, I've gotcha...

We're almost going steampunk, in a way.
 
I don't think you could drop any sort of digital technology into pre-WWII society without all the other infrastructure that supports it - computers, software and the entire semiconductor manufacturing industry. We could live without the Internet, per se, although getting digital media from one place to another would be much slower and less efficient. I doubt the capability even existed in the 1920s or '30s to reverse engineer, say, a microprocessor chip - they literally didn't possess the theory and language to describe it, or the materials science to reproduce it.

A pretty fine medium for image capture and editing already existed in the form of movie film, and it was economics, not technology, that prevented most people from having home theaters for viewing it. Well-preserved movies from the '30s (I'll exclude the era from before the development of sync sound) can still look superb when transferred to 4K digital today. As long as you have some form of gears, lenses and bright light sources, you can view an analog film strip. That would be my choice for sending today's media back to the past (or to another solar system, similar scenario). A competent mid-19th century mechanic would have been able to create a serviceable film viewer, although big screen projection with whale oil lamps might have been a bit dim. :)

- Greg
 
Greg Smith said:
A pretty fine medium for image capture and editing already existed in the form of movie film ... That would be my choice for sending today's media back to the past (or to another solar system, similar scenario).
Click to expand...

You mean like sending back modern film stock and processing chemicals?

If so, not at a bad choice at all.

I don't imagine those folks would have the ability to reverse engineer the computer chips in a digital video system any time soon, they would have to just keep up the maintenance of the machines we sent back. But maybe the tape stock itself could be reverse engineered? Which is why I was leaning toward tape. I was looking for something easy, potentially cheap(eventually) and high quality. Something that also had a decent shelf/archival life.

One of the other reasons I went video tape instead of something like film, is because film isn't always transferred over. For example Stargate SG-1 which was mostly shot on film (seasons 1-7) never got a blu-ray release. Whereas Stargate Atlantis shot in HD was released on blu-ray many years ago. Probably a decade ago. It just hasn't been financially viable to scan all the film for SG-1 and update the FX for HD. I also know there are plenty of older films from decades past that suffer the same problem or a similar problem. Like the original content creator just going out of business before DVD or blu-ray came around. So the likelihood we'll ever see that content in high quality is slim to none.
 
Update February 2021
I was transferring some old VHS tapes to DVD and Mp4 on Sunday and started thinking about this tape topic again. One of the tapes I was transferring was recorded in 1994 and still looked great. No tracking issues or other errors. Treated properly these things last a long time. I've got others from the 80s that are hit or miss.

Lately I've been diving into the history of video in general. Learning about the VR-1000 from Ampex in 1956, the first video tape recorder and some of the various formats that have existed through the decades. From open reel systems to all the cassette based systems. I never really learned any of this, and I feel a bit foolish having not looked into it all sooner considering how much video has been a major aspect of my life and career. The only excuse I have is that, as a younger guy I was into filmmaking. I studied motion picture cameras and film editing and all of that. Video was a tool I used for both home viewing and as a poor-mans production alternative to film and film cameras. My passion and love was filmmaking, not video.
Now in my early forties, looking back, I really should have appreciated video more and taken the time to learn more about its history.

Along the way I've discovered analog HD systems like HDVS and W-VHS. 1035i systems. There are various videos on youtube with demo reels and they look gorgeous. Hard to believe footage like that was coming out of the early nineties.
Right now W-VHS is captivating me since there seems to be very little footage of it that I can find. An obscure VHS variation, and yet, recorded high definition analog video to a tape the size of the VHS cassette. Which puts it as a contender for my alt history video deep think. It's not digital, it's analog. This has me wondering, could we have dropped this format into the laps of the guys at Ampex in the 1950s, and could they have figured it out and reverse engineered it? They were some smart cookies and we owe a lot to these guys. A young Ray Dolby was part of that team, which is pretty cool.

Here is one of the demo videos of W-VHS that I found: https://youtu.be/S0kq_Krzl6o
 
Ah, yeas, Понятов, Александр Матвеевич.

In any case, Sony had analog HD system by the middle 1980's. It was never adopted en masse. The image quality , obviously, depends on the scan too.

 
Solid state has ben getting cheaper and faster by magnitudes each year. Recording tape has been increasing in price steadily as sales went down. The snag here is not the recording - if you move the tape fast enough across the heads (which is why helical scan was invented - linear tape could not travel that fast without taking off) you can record it - but if you did archive tape like this, what would you play it on in ten years? The playback systems would be in land fill - worn out and knackered. I can't even play my hi-8 tapes now - all my playback machines have drive belts, or did have drive belts ten years ago - now they're little bits of brittle droppings on the chassis.
 
To answer the original question again, no, because LTO is way, way, way too noisy and power hungry for use in a camera. Because there's no rotating head, it achieves its write speed, in part, by moving the tape very quickly. It sounds like a video deck in fast wind, and then some. Data-rate-wise, it'd be possible to make a very good video camera using LTO. Probably the most capable ever video tape format was HDCAM-SR, which could achieve 880 megabits or so; that's only 110 megabytes a second, not even enough for uncompressed HD (though the compression is very gentle; less than 2:1). LTO 9 achieves 400 megabytes per second. That's enough for uncompressed 14-bit Bayer raw DCI 4K at 24 frames (350 and change). It's faster than many spinning-metal hard disks. You could buffer the stops. But no. Not a cat's chance in hell. Too loud, too thirsty.

The fact that there is still not really an archival storage solution griefs me to some extent. LTO should be good, but it's still a magnetic tape format and it's frankly too expensive for a lot of the people who really need it. It's not enough of a mass market product. The Sony optical disc archive, which is basically caddies full of stacks of eleven blu-ray-esque discs. It's far too expensive and doesn't hold a candle to LTO in terms of speed or capacity. Various things have shown up at NAB, including a true holographic disc format, but never went anywhere. I've personally written about short-duration laser pulse storage of data in glass, which would have a lot of long-term archivability, but it was a lab project at that time and a lot of engineering away from being connected to anyone's USB port. Using photochemical processes was, I fear, only really practical when we also needed those processes for something else, although I'm not blind to the upsides of readability.

This needs looking into.
 
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