Red and Blue-Ray

[vanguy]

The one thing about disk-based shooting is that it starts to follow an IT model rather than a media model. Which is new for us media-only types, and sometimes just plain too much work. I can't really afford all the infrastructure for a three tier storage system and the time to manage it properly. I'm a one-man show.

I need something that approximates videotape or film; shoot, bring it online for editing, put it in the vault. Forget it.

My experience has been corporate/educational/documentary with some drama. The drama usually gets archived forever, almost never being brought back online after completion.

But the other stuff gets reused for years, sometimes decades. And you need to bring it online relatively quickly. I've had some experience with DLT backup in the past, and it was always faster to redigitize from the camera tapes. And if you weren't sure which videotape something was on, DLT would have taken silly amounts of time compared to scanning videotapes.

So I kind of wince at an IT Solution which involves thousands of dollars of investment in the kind of technology that normally goes obsolete in a very few years, takes many hours of management on every show, and is rather difficult to bring back online. And if I put "data management" as a line item on an invoice, my clients won't complain, they'll go elsewhere.

It has to be stupid easy. Putting a show on firewire drives fits that model. I'm not dissing data tape as a reliable, cheap long-term storage medium. Go ahead and use it. But it won't work for me.

[Ace]

Disk is still a linear media when you think about it. It just has a much lower seektime to tape. You want real random access, flash is it. The great thing about tape is that unlike disk, the data is scattered accross hundreds if not thousands of feet of media. Your eggs are not all in one basket. If You archive everything on one platter, and that platter goes, then your screwed (If storing on drives, you would have 2 mirror drives at the least anyway). On the other hand, if part of your tape physically gets damaged, you can cut and splice it like you would film and attempt data retrieval. It would be good if REDCODE could be stored as seperate frames so that any corruption in backup wont effect the entire file..

[vanguy]

I think someone's gonna have to come up with a way to cheaply, easily, and safely store the petabytes of data we're all gonna have in our vaults. Holograms? 1.8" 1 TB mini-drives? Ginormous flash RAM? Self-backing, error checking storage arrays?

[Paul Leeming]

My archival storage plan will center around the modern, ubiquitous 3.5" SATA hard drive, sitting on a shelf, wrapped only in one of those soft silicone protective bumpers and labelled with the relevant info. They will only ever be used twice - once to record the camera's footage to them and verify that it is correct, and a second time to transfer that footage to the editing system drive (again verifying its integrity as you go) to do with what you want (and make further backups if you are that paranoid).

I come from the IT side of the fence and having seen plenty of drive failures in my time, it basically boils down to this - unless it has a head crash while operating, the data on the physical platters will be fine even if the electronics board dies or some other mechanical part of the drive dies. This means worst case scenario (remember, we're talking IF you need to restore from the original archive for some reason) you take your drive to a recovery centre, pay your money and they recover the info to a new drive.

For my own footage (my movies and projects) I will have two archival copies of all the original data in separate locations. For my clients, I will retain one copy of the data and I will give them the second copy as their master. How they back up from there is their concern, but they can always come back to me for the other copy if needed. Everything will be on 3.5" drives, with the client paying for the backup copy I retain (which at roughly JPY 8,000 per 320GB SATA drive is hardly a huge cost in the scheme of things).

Neat, simple and for all intents and purposes providing a secure backup system.

[Harva Raj]

Guys, holographic storage system is HERE!
http://technology.guardian.co.uk/wee...080840,00.html

The world's first commercial holographic storage system is launched this autumn, with the product able to store the equivalent of 64 DVD movies on a disc about the size of a CD.

Holographic storage offers extremely fast data transfer rates - currently up to 160Mbit/sec, though there are plans to increase this.

The first holographic products are certainly not mass-market - a 600GB disc will cost around $180 (£90), and the drive costs about $18,000. Potential users include banks, libraries, government agencies and corporations. (Filmmakers..anyone?)

The source material (such as a photographic image or video footage) is encoded with error correction and channel data, but instead of the encoding being carried out on a bit-by-bit basis (as with say, CD or DVD), around 1m bits are generated at one time, which are recorded as a single page. The process uses light from a single laser split into two - a signal beam, which carries the data, and a reference beam. Where the two beams intersect, the interference pattern (hologram) is recorded within a photosensitive storage medium.

[Jeff Kilgroe]

Er... InPhase is already selling their holographic drive with 300GB media. 600GB is due by the end of the year and 1.2TB media sometime middle of next. I stopped by their HQ (about a 25 minute drive for me) and saw the demo. I have to buy through one of their dealers, but I contacted two of them to get quotes. Both quoted full MSRP and wouldn't budge from it (those slimeballs... maybe I should become a dealer). But MSRP is $16,999 plus any cables and interface controllers that may be needed. That price gets the drive unit and one piece of 300GB media. InPhase is also selling the drive under other brand labels like AGFA.

160Mbps is not extremely fast... That's actually extremely slow. Only about double the speed of BluRay, which is not fast. Many tape systems are much faster than this and hard drive storage races past this quite easily. 160Mbits is only 20MB/s.

The InPhase Tapestry system as well as the Maxell holographic product, the media is very durable. However, it doesn't have a very long shelf life at this point -- roughly 15 years estimated as a maximum. The holographic film currently being used by these manufacturers degrades over time as badly as many of the original organic dye based CD-R media. InPhase has been very open about this and they are working on correcting this as a top priority.

[Curran Giddens]

I'm currently using a Blu-ray burner for my G5. I needed another burner since my Superdrive stopped working. To burn a 50GB BD-R DL at 2x speed takes like 90 min.!

[Jeff Kilgroe]

It will get better, obviously... Just think back to burning CD-R media with the first generation burners... 80 to 90 minutes a disc. But everyone thought it was the coolest thing ever -- we were writing to a CD! Wooohooo! I paid almost $1800 for my first CD writer and blank discs were $14 each. So, BluRay isn't much different. Actually cheaper to start out with. Prices will drop and performance will improve. I just hope Sony doesn't use their format licensing to control BD media prices with the lame excuse of controlling piracy. Which they have already started to do in some sense. Not cool...