HVX TAPE Back Up Question

M

Mortimer

Active member
Just trying to figure out some workflow ideas for the HVX.

Say we shoot 720p, and would like to back up to tape, what type of HD tape do we use to back up to, and if we have the project on an external could we just bring the external into the post house and have them create it? Also, any rough price ideas for the cost of this? A lot of clients still like to have tapes in their hands, but we would like them to be somewhat future proof and giving them a HD tape would be ideal.

Thanks!
 
HI,
one solution, as you were saying, is to bring your external with dvcpro HD clips to a post house that has FCP or other NLE sw to transfer natively to DvcPro HD tapes. The cost could be "high" as you rent NLE time with DvcPro Recorder VTR. Or same workflow but transfer to DigiBeta or similar in SD format.
One easiest is to rent a DvcPro HD recorder with firewire and transfer at your studio the clips to tape.
Third one use the HD/SD Component output of the HVX to transfer/downconvert in real time to Digibeta or DvcPro or Beta SP if you have one in house.

rap
 
We are using SDLT 160-320, which is a very standard tape backup medium in the computer industry, but I don't know how widespread it is as far as trading between production houses.

The SDLT drive isn't super fast, it writes about 1 to 1-1/2 gigs/minute, so depending on what resolution footage you're storing, it will store 1 to 5 minutes of footage per minute. You can fit about 160 gigs on one tape which, again, will be 160 to 480 minutes of footage per tape.

The tapes are expensive ($20-40 each) but there are a lot of "used once" tapes on Ebay (2nd backups of archival storage) that come up for sale and you can often get them for $8-10 each.

Our workflow is to download the Firestore to the computer, where it's stored on a RAID-5 storage server, and then we immediately back up the Firestore files on SDLT. The RAID-5 itself is also backed up, so there's a double backup (essentially a tape with the source material that came out of the camera, and a series of tapes that backs up the entire drive.)
 
I don't trust tape, even though it has a proven track record. I use removable hard drives, and optical (even though it's not very reliable, why not?).

I'm looking in to a REV disk 70GB system when it comes down in price. Right now it's the fastest and most reliable system at the moment. But we'll have to see it's track record to be sure.


Tape is the past, and also the decks are A FORTUNE! You could buy like 5Terrabytes worth of harddisks for the price of once deck.
 
Well... here's my take.

In the past 2 years, we have had TEN hard drive failures. All were in portable drive enclosures. Most were Maxtor and Western Digital drives, but honestly, I have had failures of pretty much every brand over the years. And no, we don't abuse our drives, they live a pretty sheltered life and were used primary as transfer media.

There is also a known bug in Windows (all versions through XP, not sure about Vista) and external (firewire or USB) drives where in some cases, simultaneous read/write to multiple USB channels will cause data corruption.

For me, I would much rather have my data stored on a static, passive media than on one involving platters spinning at 7200rpm with heads flying around with a distance 1/10 of a human hair between the head and the platter... not to mention the potential for electronic failures (motor going bad, logic board failing, etc... each of which I have seen at least once over the years.)

Tape may have its problems (slow, and arguably tape is more prone to failure than hard drives) but tapes are cheap and contain pretty much no moving parts. I can store 160 gigs of video data for about $15, which means I can make multiple backups and be pretty damn certain that at least one of them will work. And the fact that the Library of Congress has chosen tape as their long-term archival storage media... I think the reliability of tape is pretty solid.

BTW, the SDLT and LTO drives are apparently insanely reliable, and used ones can be had on Ebay for $400-800, so they aren't really that expensive, and tapes can be had in bulk for $8-15 each.

Adding up these factors, and given that banks, data storage centers, and other mission-critical applications all use either LTO or DLT as their backup media, tape just feels like s to me a much more robust long-term storage.
 
Maxtor & WD may be a part of it . . . but still TEN drives in two years? That's a lot! I'd be looking (hard) at what it is in/about your environment that might possibly be contributing to such a high failure rate.

I may be exceptionally lucky but I haven't dropped a drive in twenty years (really). Nothing is fail-safe . . . your most economical solution is going to be hard drives . . . Just maintain two, no? B&H has G-Tech's G-Raid2 (1000 GB) at $679.

Just my opinion but (1) The client needs to be educated so that they will not only "accept" a digital workflow but they will fund it properly. And (2), for the people that really "need" tape, they're probably better off selecting the appropriate camera and shooting tape from the get go.

P.S. I have been using LTO-2 (for long term archive) more than a year with no regrets.
 
I'm not used to tape archival, and I just have trust issues with it, so for me it's not an option, even though for many it's actually quite a good one.

The drives just cost too much. 600$ and I'd go for it, but 1500 starting price is insane. Yes, yes, I know for what you're getting it's not that bad, but I'd rather just backup to four mirrored hard drives. Faster, cheaper, and better for me.

I'm going to try optical, even though its slow, but it can have quite a long life if the media is good. AND it's cheap.

My final destination is REV media. 70GB uncompressed, that's over an hour of 1080p from my HVX. 30 year archival life, and 50$ soon to be 40$. Not too bad.

In the meantime seagate drives have pretty amazing reliability. They had so many problems in the past that they are really going nuts on reliability now to bring back their rep.

5 year warranty on almost ALL of their drives, Even western digital is only 3 years.

Everyone else is 1 year.

AND BTW, to calchip, WD, and Maxtor are literally the two makers of drives most likely to fail. Maxtor is the worst. WD is a very distant second. Seagate is very rare, and will pay to retrieve your data within the 5 year warranty.

Hey switching the media every 5 years isn't a bad plan for 200$ on a 750GB HD.
 
Totally with you on the Maxtors and WDs. I've always thought they were ****, but then was having problems with Seagate and IBM and Hitachi for a while, so I just figured they all suck now and then, and they couldn't possibly be that awful if everyone was using them... but now I know better.

So far (knock wood) we haven't had a single Seagate failure. Same is also true for Samsung drives. We have two RAID 5 arrays, one with 4 drives and one with 3, with a 4th drive that acts as a hot spare for the two arrays. All the drives in the arrays are Seagate 750 SATAs, and I built a custom box with industrial-strength cooling for the drives. So for us, the RAID arrays are the online storage, which is pretty secure, and the SDLT serves as an archival backup medium.

You can definitely find a used SDLT drive for cheap, and from everything I've heard, they pretty much never break. We paid $500 for ours off of Ebay, I've seen quite a few of 'em for about $400 to $800.

The only thing about DVD storage that makes me nervous was when we used to send DVD masters to our disc replication facility, and had a lot of problems with errors in the DVDs. There's a error correction mechanism, but my understanding is that optical discs are more prone to errors than tape.

But... to each his own, I guess. the DVD media is certainly a lot less expensive than tape.
 
Are there any affordable and portable options to record to tape in the field while shooting to P2?
 
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