Tape Archival services

Milkbone

Milkbone

Member
I'm thinking about offering a service where I'll take DVCPRO HD footage and output it to tape for archival. I have the AJ HD 1200A, and a FCP HD Blackmagic system. So it can be lossless.. just moving the footage onto tape. I don't have a DVX yet, but am going to sell my FX1 and upgrade to one.

As a shooter I'm of course concerned about tapeless because I keep everything. And even if hard drives were cheap enough, they are volatile and I've lost data more than once. So the best way to archive footage is to tape. Which made me realize that since I already have the deck, it's a service I should offer. It's a very expensive deck and it needs to start paying for itself.

SO.. I'm just putting it out there and am looking for input and advice from the community. Here's how I expect it would go down:

* Standard procedures are important to streamline the process and to keep it inexpensive. Therefore you would place clips in folders called "tape1" "tape2" etc., and they would be put to tape in alphabetical order. Tapes have a 31min limitation at 100mps (or DVCPRO HD).
* You fed-ex me a firewire hard drive that's good enough to play the material off, and one that can be mounted on a mac. If I have to copy the material to a fast drive it would take time and cost more
* Of course you shouldn't send me your only copy of the media. I recommend buying a drive just for this and I can recommend one.
* I fed-ex back the tapes and the drive.

Questions:

1. I'm sure someone else is doing this, but I've heard that it's expensive. I'm looking to keep it inexpensive and make money on quantity. What price would you be willing to pay? Keep in mind that the price will include the tape stock, which is expensive.

2. Minimum orders. What is a reasonable minimum order?

3. Turn around. Is turn around more important or a good price? Maybe add a rush charge? What's a reasonable turn around?

4. How often would you see yourself using a service like this? How are you archiving your footage now?

5. Is it a big deal that timecode on the archival tape would not be the same as your source footage?

6. Would you then want to also have a reasonable rate to capture the footage back in, using a similar procedure?

-Michael T. Smith (aka Milkbone)
 
Milkbone,

I think it's a good idea to offer these services, I'm currently archiving to DVD and HD RAID, but I could see myself using this for something particularly important.

A couple of questions:
1st, is it not possible to connect the 1200 to the computer via firewire? That would be truly lossless. if you're using the blackmagic board, you're going from compressed dvcproHD to uncompressed back to DVCPROHD, so the degradation might be minimal, but it will still be there.

2nd, I don't see why you would want to place a minimum on an order, do one-offs and batches, and vary the prices accordingly.

3rd, If timecode doesn't match, then for me, this would be useless. I know my DSR-11 can read the timecode that FCP outputs via firewire, couldn't you do something similar with RS422 or firewire on the 1200?

OK, those are my thoughts, I hope it's helpful.
 
I was starting to think that no one would ever want this. After reading around the forum a bit, it seems the most everyone is archiving to DVD or blue ray.

Thanks for the feedback.

Oh yes... my declaration of my blackmagic system was just to inform. The deck is conneted to my FCP via firewire. I rarely use the HD SDI... mostly just to output stuff shot on HDV. The blackmagic will output HDV in realtime (no rendering) to the SDI port for output to DVCPRO HD. DVCPRO is a better mastering format than HDV. I never output from the computer to HDV tape. (oops.. got off subject.)

Min order.. well I've been considering prices less than $100 US per tape including stock. I know even that is a lot of money to some, but I think it's way less than a dub house would charge. I'm trying to consider time, equipment use, and the inevitable time the will be sucked up by occasional technical problems. Since every time I do it there will be something different about the footage. Like being shot in different formats. But a minumum order would just make it worth my while to do it. I was thinking $250 as a minimum - but what if that got you 3 tapes dubed.

Timecode matching.. Well, if there were 20 - 1 minute clips and each had a different timecode, how would I clone that timecode onto the tape for each clip? I think if the footage is in the camera on a P2 card it looks like (from reading the manual) you can clone the clip to a deck via firewire and the timecode will go with it. But I don't think FCP can do that.

Anyone have any ideas on this? I can't copy the footage to P2 cards cause the time it would take would be cost prohibitive.

I could always capture the footage back to your hard drive afterwards with new timecode. Or maybe modify the clips so that the timecode matches that on the tape.

Maybe the whole concept just doesn't work. Please give thoughts.
 
Sounds like a nice service to have available, but most people would probably prefer to buy an additional hard drive to backup their data. This is easier, faster, cheeper. Your service would be great for making a DVCProHD master of a final project. Of course, other tape formats are more popular for that...
 
Yeah.. maybe it's not viable as a business. I really just want to put my 1200A to use, so that it can start paying for itself. I bought it for one job because it was cheaper than renting it. But of course then Panasonic came out with a less expensive, newer version making mine worth less than I still owe on it.

I worry that they'll do that with the HVX as well... release a new version right after I buy it.
 
I'm using an LTO-2 tape drive purchased on eBay several months ago for $750. You can find new tapes for $20-25. To this point I have suffered no failures or experienced any issues.

(I also have my camera data files & folders backed up to two different hard drives).
 
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