The cost of storing footage.

RyanF

RyanF

Member
Has anyone here addressed the issue of storing HD footage? If you work with DV currently it seems like storing the HD footage could get expensive. I'm sure you can see where I'm going with this.

Is there an easy answer to store raw HD footage? What would you all suggest? I was thinking I could bounce the footage to DVCPro tapes but then I need to invest in a deck. And if I bought a deck, would that be cheaper that investing in hard drive storage like a raid? And again if I got a raid, how much could I store on it and would I even want to do that? My guess is that bouncing to tape would be the most logical in the end. What are your thoughts?

Thanks in advance.
 
Storing on DVCPRO-HD tape is the most *illogical* method, for two reasons:

1) the cheapest decks cost $25,000 and up
2) you lose all the metadata and clip-based nature of the footage when storing to DVCPRO-HD tape.

A much better solution would be to store to LTO, SAIT, or DLT. Use computer data backup tapes. The tape drives are 1/10 the cost of a DVCPRO-HD deck, the individual tapes are less expensive, and they retain all the metadata and I.T.-based nature of the footage.
 
You can burn to DVD. You can store on a drive with Raid 1. You can copy footage to a couple extra drives (depending on how much you shoot).

Anytime you step up in quality the prices are going to go up.

I plan on doing Raid 1, store the master on an extra 2 drives and burning original files to DVD.
 
Barry_Green said:
Storing on DVCPRO-HD tape is the most *illogical* method, for two reasons:

1) the cheapest decks cost $25,000 and up
2) you lose all the metadata and clip-based nature of the footage when storing to DVCPRO-HD tape.

A much better solution would be to store to LTO, SAIT, or DLT. Use computer data backup tapes. The tape drives are 1/10 the cost of a DVCPRO-HD deck, the individual tapes are less expensive, and they retain all the metadata and I.T.-based nature of the footage.
Click to expand...

Another great post Barry. I have no idea what it means. what is
metadata
clip based nature
lto
sait
dlt
it based nature
 
Barry's stuff is easy to google - it mostly tape info.

Per tape, I'm already using VXA which I found to be a better deal than dlt/sait/lto because the tapes are so much more robust.
 
I'll take a stab at answering that Brian

Metadata is information that is stored about a clip such as exposure/shutter speed etc... In the Digital Photo world it's called exif data. Click here and look at the info under the photo.

Clip Based Nature - means that each time you start and stop the camera each scene is stored as an individual clip. Tapes store everything as one long clip until you capture it and break it up.

lto
sait
dlt - are all computer data tape storage devices that store anywhere from 80-300 gigs per tape.

IT based nature - just means keeping everything in the computer "IT" world instead of going back to production tape world.
 
DVD doesn't have enough capacity to be worthwhile for HD. Let's use the 1gb/1min ratio and you've got merely 4 min of footage per DVD. Lets look at dual-layer BluRay - 50gb.. that's more a realistic, even single layer at 25Gb.

I've been looking into storage options and costs, the advantage of working at Dell and having Technical Sales Rep's around is that I can ask specific questions and not have any obligation to buy!! The cost of storage is clearly a massive increase in costs over DV. DLT and LTO are good options. Tape overall isn't "cheap" but are a hell of a lot less expensive than the DVCPRO-HD option, and as Barry advised - has a much better . LTO-3 is the highest capacity at 400Gb Native / 800gb compressed with a backup speed of 288Gb/hr, but of course the most expensive ($82/tape). With these options you still need the specific software for recovering your backed up data, so you're looking at around $2K for a DLT drive, up to $3500 for an LTO-3 Drive. Around $500-1500 for the software. Total cost of ownership is very high - when comparing to the requirements of DV - but no-one said HD was going to be cheap!

Even buying SATA or IDE HDD's as you need them is cheaper than DVCPRO-HD.RAID 1 is good security.. RAID 0+1 is better for speed. RAID 5 is probably the best compromise as it has good speed advantages, borrowed from RAID 0 - with the security of parity throughout the array. So if you have 5 identically sized drives, you have the capacity of 4 and one virtual parity drive for reconstructing data if one of the drives in the array fails... You get good speed, good capacity and good security. RAID 6 is even better security - two virtual parity drives, so for example 6 drives give the capacity of four but the extra security of more parity data across the array.

A large RAID array for medium term storage, (not used for production) - but purely back-up in combination with DLT/LTO tape for long term is a really good idea for security.

Anyway that's my 5c.... All MORE money of course....

Cheers, Nathan.
 
Thanks for the replies guys. Those sound like great answers and thanks for making good sense of it. Barry, I know the metadata would be useful but how often do you think it will actually be used? Creating names for the clips in the field could be great and knowing things like frame rate would be helpful I guess. Will there be a button for "good take" and things of that nature to mark clips quickly?

Also, how does storing to computer backup tapes work? What's the process of doing so? Will a deck come with some software that will input the info you select onto a tape? Is there anywere online that you can suggest where I can learn more about it?

Thanks again.
 
brianluce said:
Another great post Barry. I have no idea what it means.
Click to expand...
Hah! Excellent -- I didn't realize what an indecipherable stream of gobbledygook it was until your response made me look at it again.

Sirius answered it all, but I'll just put it in different context:

Think about DV tape on the tape itself. Then think about DV after you've captured it to your hard disk. On the tape, it's an hour-long continuous stream. On the hard disk, it's a bunch of individual clips.

If you had to restore your project to tape, would you rather have to go in and re-capture every file off of tape, or would you rather that the system just restore all your files to you the way they were?

That's the "clip-based" meaning. When the HVX shoots, every time you press "stop" it makes a unique file. Not a stream on a tape where you have to log timecode and all that linear nonsense; instead it's a file on a disk. So backing up to data storage tape (a DLT drive, or an SAIT drive, or an LTO drive) will back up those files. Instead, if you archived out to DVCPRO-HD tape, you'd be turning your individual clips back into a big long continuous video stream. So when it comes time to restore your project, you'd have to go in and log it and set in and out points and capture blah blah blah... vs. with the data tape idea (DLT or SAIT or LTO etc) you'd just say "restore files" and it'd restore your project back to its original state.

Secondly, metadata -- it's data about the data. So you could assign a text file to your clip, for example -- let's say you're archiving your footage for stock footage purposes, so you write a descriptive file describing each footage clip -- "sunset in Maui with dolphins" or "homeless man barfing on shoes in San Francisco winter" -- whatever describes the footage. You can then search your footage by searching for the text file. The text file is "attached" to the video file. Find the text file, you've found the footage. No more scanning through hour after hour of tape to try to find something -- instead, just do a text search. With the clip-based nature of P2/HVX footage, you can do that. But if you archive to DVCPRO-HD tape, all that capability goes away.

Another metadata file you can have is a proxy file -- say, a low-res MPEG-4 version that takes up practically no space. So you keep your original file in its full DVCPRO-HD 100megabit glory, but you also make a low-res proxy file that is maybe 320x200 at 5 megabits or something. This proxy gets "attached" to your clip. So, if you archive onto DVD-R, for example, you can play back the proxy file and see what the actual file is. DVCPRO-HD data might be way too big and too slow to play back live from a DVD-R, but the tiny proxy file should instantly, easily play back. Or, if you're scanning through your archive looking for a file (by searching through the text), you could decide to restore just the proxy file (2 megabytes maybe) instead of un-archiving the whole 4-gigabyte main file. That way you could watch the proxy file and say "yep, that's the clip I'm looking for" or "hmm, wrong clip" and then keep searching, without having to go through the wait of extracting the wrong (huge) clip from the archive.

Other examples of metadata include a voice memo tag, something that you can record in the field and attach to the file. The example Panasonic gives is if you're interviewing someone, you can record them pronouncing their name so that the news reporter hears the proper pronunciation.

Metadata can be pretty darn cool. And DVCPRO-HD tape throws it all away, and archives only the video and the program audio. But archiving onto hard disks or DVD-R or Blu-Ray or DLT or SAIT or LTO, you'll keep all the metadata, all the individual clips, all that stuff.

That's why I say -- archiving to DVCPRO-HD tape is the least desirable way to archive. Any data-archiving method would be preferable to archiving on DVCPRO-HD tape.
 
Nathan_Rodger said:
DVD doesn't have enough capacity to be worthwhile for HD. Let's use the 1gb/1min ratio and you've got merely 4 min of footage per DVD. Lets look at dual-layer BluRay - 50gb.. that's more a realistic, even single layer at 25Gb.
Click to expand...
It's a nice thought, but the HVX is out in a month and consumer-available Blu-Ray has just barely begun to peek over the horizon. DVD is going to have to cut it for those who don't have the money in DLT (or don't prefer that method of storage), but fortunately, dual layer DVD-R discs make a fantastic 1:1 backup solution for 8GB P2 cards (currently the largest P2 card available). Hopefully by the time P2 gets larger we'll have a useable Blu-Ray solution, but it can't be touted as a realistic archiving solution for the time being.
 
why not storing on plain old hardrives? at 250 gigs hovering around 120 bucks it beats tape and optical in every way except wieght and phsyical size
 
The idea of individual clips as a reason not to back up to DVCpro-50 doesn't quite make sense. Any half way decent editing/capture software will have an option to "create new clip at time code break" so as long as your running time of day you will be creating new clips everytime you start and stop the camera. And supposedly timecode is transfered over from firewire onto any tape layouts from the HVX-200.
 
Hi all!

This thread is echoing some of my concerns, and I've already learned a lot from it: thank you all!

Particularly the price and speed of present day tape storage drives was very enlightening. The last time I used DLT was in 1998, when the best capacity was 40GB compressed, and reading and writing was SLOOOOOOW. 288GB/hour on the LTO-3? Damn.

I have some pressing questions that remain. Using a SCSI to USB2 adapter to connect a tape drive to my Dell laptop, what kind of speed limitations am I looking at? Is such an adapter simply limited by the USB2 transfer speed limits, or do we take an extra speed hit from the adapter itself? Using such a device, does anyone know what practical archiving speeds one can expect for the various types of drives?

Also, the latest press releases are making Blu-ray sound imminent, and they seem to be indicating that PC dual layer 2x burners will be available during the first quarter 2006. Lets be conservative and estimate the cost of these first models to be around a grand. It seems to me that for those who can limp along for a few months, Blu-ray would be a far more economical option than tape. For the price of a DLT drive, you could have two Blu-ray burners burning simultaneously, giving you archive redundancy (one disc to mail to your base and the other to keep with you if you are in the field).
The 'magnetic' in magnetic tape has always made me feel nervous too...

What do you folks think?

M.
 
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