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LTO3A Help

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zak forrest

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I'm hoping someone can help me out.

I just turned on my Quantum LTO3A desktop drive for the first time in maybe 9 months, it's always worked perfectly.

I formatted a brand new tape, and tried dragging a file from the left window to the right window (the tape) in the java app using Safari, and nothing happens.

At this point it is supposed to start copying the file but nothing happens, can anyone help me with this?


I called Quantum and they want me to pay $750 for two hours of phone support! which I am not about to do… hope someone can help me here..
 
Have you tried a cleaning tape? Could just be dirty.

I'd also recommend anyone with a 3A start migrating to any other LTO format (LTFS, Bru, Cache-A, raw tar) because once these decks die, there will be no way to get your data back. We had intended to read these tapes, paid Quantum for the rights to do so, but found it would be way too much effort to implement. So when the last 3A deck dies, all that data dies with them.

Here's a link to our Quantum Migration strategy document
 
i didnt try a cleaning tape but it seemed to get stuck before it even got to that stage. i think its a java thing. if i downgrade to an ancient java version it will supposedly work, i have been too busy to try. maybe ill downgrade on my laptop and use that as the "LTO3A computer" from now on..

upgrading to a new tape drive model seems expensive and crazy to me. i know backing up data is no joke, and if you can afford all the other equipment you should be able to afford proper backup systems etc, but i dont think i can go down the LTO road anymore, i dont know what im gonna do with these old tapes, ill probably put the precious stuff on some more drives but surely there will be plenty of LTO3A drives around the world for a long time to come for people that need to get old data off them right?
 
I'm not so sure that there are that many LTO-3a drives around anymore. There used to be at least a dozen on offer at eBay at any given time. I just checked, and there was only one single drive. (incidentally, a LTO-4 drive can be had for less than the LTO-3a one. Might just be a sign.)

I guess I'll have to take Toms advice in the very near future.
 
May I piggy-pack to this thread a question.

If I move on to LTO-4 (or 5) on a Mac, what software do I need to get the file transfer going? Right now I am only used to the LTO-3a way of doing things, which basically turns the tape drive into a (slow: yes, clumsy: oh, yes) disk drive. And my understanding is that standard LTO is a different beast. (I heard people being v. unhappy about Retrospect since it was bought by Roxio.)
 
I agree with Martin - LTO-3A drives are disappearing as time goes on - if Quantum hadn't given up after the 3, users would have a path forward but they did and that means the end for that solution. Whether it is a case of java moving on or hardware failure, eventually 3A tapes will be unreadable. Making tapes with open standards is the only way to go, and that means tar or LTFS IMO.

If you stick an LTO-4 or 5 in a Mac with a SAS HBA, software choices are limited because Apple never shipped native tape drivers with the Mac OS. Bru has been the only solution like this for years (also proprietary, but at least escrowed). Now that LTFS is out (LTO-5 only), you can actually download the software for free from IBM or HP and end up with a tape drive that looks like a disk directly attached to your workstation. This is a real two edged sword, but works great if used within some narrow rules - you might want to read some of our caveats about this in our LTFS FAQ (found at the top of http://www.cache-a.com/supportfaq.php).

I know many of the users on these forums are seeking the absolute lowest cost solutions and consider their time and effort free, but I would be remiss if I didn't at least mention that we have complete archive solutions that don't tie up a PCI slot in your mac, are available to all computers on a network including Macs, PCs and Linux systems, allow you to archive in either tar or LTFS, don't need any software on your workstations, plug and play with minimal effort to deploy, and keep a searchable database of every tape they've ever seen. We think that, if you pay yourself for the time to research, acquire, install, test, and develop workflows, our solutions are a good deal. [end of advertisement, sorry]

BTW, let me dispel the idea that LTO is slow - 120 MB/s (LTO-4) or 140MB/s (5) are the raw sustained data rates these drives can deliver - no single hard disk drive can come close. Clumsy perhaps because they are linear and it can take as much as 2-3 minutes to even get to a particular file (worst case), but once there, you can read or write data faster than a 2 drive RAID.
 
Tom Goldberg said:
I agree with Martin - LTO-3A drives are disappearing as time goes on - if Quantum hadn't given up after the 3, users would have a path forward but they did and that means the end for that solution. Whether it is a case of java moving on or hardware failure, eventually 3A tapes will be unreadable. Making tapes with open standards is the only way to go, and that means tar or LTFS IMO.
Click to expand...
Tom, I noticed that LTO-3 was introduced in 2005 (according to Wikipedia). Here we are in 2012, and now the format is disappearing.

The question I have is: if somebody invests in (let's say) LTO-5 today, what guarantee do we have that the drives will work in 2025? My observation is that the tapes might hold up, but if the drive mechanisms are no longer supported, users are screwed.

This is a major problem, from where I sit. To me, the only thing you can do is have a massive data migration project where everything is constantly moving from old formats to new ones and being checked as you go. (I'm talking about a major studio archive, where there's many hundreds of Petabytes' worth of material.) Even for a busy post house, they're going to be dealing with hundreds of Terabytes' worth of material for just a single 4K feature project. If there's multiple projects going on, this is going to be a tough task -- assuming about 4 hours per LTO-5 backup.

Note that I have seen old LTO-3 tapes fail spectacularly within the last few years, and it's not a pretty sight. A lot of this happened because they didn't backup in verify mode (due to time considerations), plus I think they ran into a batch of tapes that had dropout and corruption issues -- they might have been Fuji, as I recall. Scary.
 
Marc, I have to agree with your analysis that any archiving solution requires periodic migration. Not only does media and recording formats move on, but so do data types and the software needed to read files. So no question that any digital archive needs to be periodically reviewed for integrity and compatibility, and at some point migrated to a more modern solution. But the situation may not be as bad as you imply.

To begin with, LTO-3 is not going away any time soon. Yes, the specialized Quantum LTO-3A is done-for, but the basic 3 format is still widely used throughout the IT industry. In fact you can easily still buy LTO-2 tape drives and probably even 1's if you look. Then, every LTO generation can read back two generations, so a brand new LTO-5 deck can read LTO-3 tapes (as long as they are written with software that's still available). Finally, LTO has a roadmap through Gen 8 which should come out around 2019 (and available for years after that) if they keep to the every-three-year cycle they've been on. We nominally write to tape using 'tar' which is a Unix technology that has been around since the late '70s, now available on every computer OS, and we see no reason why tapes we write shouldn't be readable long past the time when the data formats are legacy and software to use the files will be much harder to find than equipment to get it off tape. We also offer the new LTFS format which is looking like it will be the next new standard and also available for the foreseeable future of LTO. So LTO for 2025 looks like a pretty safe bet.

The failures you've had with LTO-3 tapes are not typical. Media manufactures are subjected to rigid standards and the tape life is purported to be 30 years. We work with Fuji and have not experienced any media issues like what you are describing. Based on what we've all seen with video tape, there's no reason that LTO media carefully stored shouldn't last for a very long time. Also, every LTO tape drive does "read-verified-writes" in hardware automatically - so every byte is verified behind the scenes and each block is rewritten if there were errors. There may in fact be transcription errors and even media errors, but these should be very rare (on the same order as memory or hard drive errors). There are computer issues assuring that every file is written, and that it is written in its entirety, but problems like that aren't the fault of LTO.
 
Read after Write is limited by the GIGO factor

Read after Write is limited by the GIGO factor

Warning - lengthy response below. For the quick read, please check out our white paper on this topic: Reliable Verification

Tom Goldberg said:
The failures you've had with LTO-3 tapes are not typical. Media manufactures are subjected to rigid standards and the tape life is purported to be 30 years. We work with Fuji and have not experienced any media issues like what you are describing. Based on what we've all seen with video tape, there's no reason that LTO media carefully stored shouldn't last for a very long time. Also, every LTO tape drive does "read-verified-writes" in hardware automatically - so every byte is verified behind the scenes and each block is rewritten if there were errors. There may in fact be transcription errors and even media errors, but these should be very rare (on the same order as memory or hard drive errors). There are computer issues assuring that every file is written, and that it is written in its entirety, but problems like that aren't the fault of LTO.
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Tom's comment here is true to a point (and please don't read that as a criticism of Tom :wink5: ). Unfortunately, the tape hardware "read after write" mechanism can't take into account data that was transferred incorrectly from the system. In that case, it becomes a Garbage In, Garbage Out (GIGO) scenario.

ALL tape drives have supported read after write going back as far as the QIC-27 days (circa 1985) - [EDIT] A former Archive cohort reminded me that the technology and design go back to 1981. However, if a software vendor simply assumes that what they tossed to the drive actually got written to the tape without checking it in some more reliable manner, they are naive at best and careless at worst and that's why so many customers are burned by tape backups. Assuming no physical damage to the tape - it's not the tape, but rather the software used to write the tape that should be blamed for these failures.

I've been doing tape - both hardware and software design - since 1984. I have witnessed all sorts of failures with the data written to tape, but short of serious mishandling or damage, I've never seen a tape that didn't contain what was written onto it. This doesn't mean that it was written correctly, just that the data that WAS written was there. Because we are aware of this, BRU uses an end-to-end protection mechanism that provides a 32bit CRC for every 2K of data read from your filesystem. By applying the checksum immediately after reading the data from the filesystem means that we are totally in control of the data that is sent to the drive for the complete data stream (assuming the files on the filesystem aren't already corrupt) and can reverify the written data at any point in time - even on a different system or platform.

The key to successful backups and archives is diligence on both the software vendors' and your part. Be sure read that white paper I link to at the top of this reply.

Tim
 
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I will again link to the Motion Picture Academy's recent report, The Digital Dilemma, which cites the uncertainty about long-term digital movie backups, and what's going to happen to them over time:

http://origin-www.oscars.org/science-technology/council/projects/digitaldilemma2/download.php

I'd like to hear about a backup strategy that would guarantee me in writing that I could retrieve all the digital files without a possible flaw 20 years from now. Even a 10-year guarantee would be something.

For those who don't have the stomach to go through a 128-page technical report, here's a summary from last Friday's Daily Variety:

Acad sounds alarm about fragility of digital prod'n
Sci-Tech report spotlights short lifespan of non-film formats
By DAVID S. COHEN

On the day that Sundance kicked off and Eastman Kodak filed for bankruptcy, the Motion Picture Academy threw a bucket of ice water on the digital filmmaking revolution.

Preserving movies is an ongoing issue for the entire industry, but a new report from the Acad warns that movies shot or finished digitally face a lifespan so short they can be lost even before they get distribution. Worse, indie and docu filmmakers, whose work is most vulnerable to this risk, seem oblivious to the danger.Those grim conclusions, found in the long-awaited Part Two of the Acad's Science & Technology Council "Digital Dilemma" report on the problems of digital preservation, will likely make for some somber chatter in Park City.

Where part one (released in 2007) focused on the studios, the second installment looks at indies and docs and finds "the technology that makes it easy to make the picture also underlies the lack of guaranteed long-term access to it." And while the Acad found those communities still ignorant of the fragility of digital files, it may not matter -- those sectors lack the resources to attack the problem anyway.

"The bottom line is we're running out of time," Sci-Tech Council member Milt Shefter, co-author of the report, told Variety. "The time for studies is past. We have to find some solutions or we're going to lose a lot of material."

In short, digital storage, be it on hard drives, DVDs or solid-state memory, simply isn't on a par for anything close to the 100-plus-year lifespan of film. The life of digital media is measured in years, not decades, and file formats can go obsolete in months, not years. As the report explains, that affects movies still looking for distribution, not merely library titles. "In general," the report says, "independent films that beat the odds and secure some form of distribution do so after a much longer time period than movies produced by the major studios. This time period quite likely exceeds the 'shelf life' of any digital work; that is, by the time distribution is secured, the digital data may become inaccessible.

"Most of the filmmakers surveyed and interviewed for this report were not aware of the perishable nature of digital content or how short its unmanaged lifespan is compared to the 95-plus years that U.S. copyright laws allow filmmakers to benefit from their work."

Much indie content, the report says, is in danger of being lost before it can receive the full benefits of those 95 years of protection.

Shefter called filmmakers' ignorance of the issue "probably our biggest surprise."

"They were concentrating on the benefits of digital workflow," he said, "but weren't thinking about what happens to their (digital) masters. They're structured to make their movie, get it in front of an audience, and then move onto the next one."

Also a surprise to the Acad's researchers: Documentarians also were unaware of the vulnerability of digital files. On the contrary, documakers were generally excited about the easy access to footage in the digital age. When Acad interviewers raised the idea that there might be "a black hole for the last 25-30 years" because digital files aren't being preserved, said Shefter, "they really didn't get that."

"The main difference between analog and digital is, analog was store-and-ignore," said Shefter. "Digital has to be actively managed."

Such active management is expensive, however, vastly more expensive than putting film in a vault. Even when they take such steps, however, filmmakers and producers are up against an insurmountable problem: The only reliable method for archiving digital images is to go analog. The best archiving solution today is to print out to film, ideally with a three-color separation printed onto black-and-white archival film. That's a very expensive solution.

The Academy is doing what it can to help address the problem, said Andy Maltz, director of the Sci-Tech Council. "One of the keys to preservation is to have file-format standards, so if you can recover the zeros and ones, you'll know what they mean and know what they're supposed to look like on the screen." The Acad's Image Interchange Framework project is helping create such standards. SMPTE will be publishing the first of them later this year.

The Acad is coordinating Hollywood's efforts to work with the Library of Congress and with other industries to find a method for archiving digital data. But, said Maltz, "It's up to the manufacturers to incorporate archival lifetimes into their products." Fortunately for the entertainment industry, it's not alone in facing this issue. Banking, medicine, energy and other fields all need to preserve digital data for more than a few years, and they're all looking for the same elusive breakthrough.

The report says that unless preservation becomes a requirement for planning, budgeting and marketing strategies, it will remain a problem for indie filmmakers, documentarians and archives alike. "These communities, and the nation's artistic and cultural heritage, would greatly benefit from a comprehensive, coordinated digital preservation plan for the future."

The report includes proposals for more education, sharing of information and collaboration among archives and other orgs.

Shefter was careful to say that the Council and the report are not attacking digital, which offers "tremendous benefits" in some areas. Said Shefter, "The broader issue is (that) as we embrace the benefits of the newer technology, one thing is missing: long-term guaranteed access. That's what the analog world had and we think any replacement should have at least as much."

http://www.variety.com/article/VR1118048861
 
MPA Report is based on 5 to 15 year old reference data

MPA Report is based on 5 to 15 year old reference data

While I have great respect for the MPA as an organization, I've read the original report and portions of this new report and all I can say is that the authors and "study" organizers are naive and uneducated about the true nature of digital storage, tape in general and LTO in specific context. In fact, the lack of a mention in the Variety piece about digital tape - note they focused on disk, SSD, and DVD / Optical - is further damning of the study's lack of thoroughness. The off-hand claim that all digital media has a short life cycle is totally incorrect. I agree that mentioned media types are not the answer because the 2-5 years life expectancy of modern disk technology and the unknown reliability level of SSD is problematic, but the fact that archival grade LTO tape is not even mentioned is carelessness.

As for technology advancement and obsolescence, yes there will be migration opportunities as technology moves forward, but a solid understanding of the digital world beyond the camera and the NLE software and into the world of computers really is necessary to understand and plan for your archival needs into the future. That understanding will take into account the storage, handling, and migration process and thereby make it a non-event in the life cycle of your work. You will need to plan and "keep up" with the changes, however, as Tom said, we can still get an LTO-1 tape drive from HP if we really need one. Or, simply use an LTO-3 (which are still being manufactured) since it can read the LTO-1 tapes.

This does mean that the archival and storage teams can no longer simply toss a set of canisters on the shelf for 100 years, but then again, how many of the claimed 100 year old films can actually be pulled back off the shelf, threaded onto a modern projector and played without some form of recovery and reconstruction? All you need to do is spend a week watching TMC and listening to the stories of the lost films, trashed segments, and recovery expenses to see that the 100 year film life expectancy is also far from true.

As to a written guarantee that you'll be able to recover data from any medium, well, that's as impossible to provide as a guarantee that Kodak will still be making film stock in 2020. We really have no way of knowing what next week will bring, let alone 10 or 25 years from now. However, I can honestly state that I have QIC, DAT, DLT, and LTO tapes that were written as far back as the mid-80's and we can still completely recover the data from them. Users are going to do whatever they believe is right for them, but these reports are both full of no longer valid data and invalid assumptions based on those invalid data points. The digital world has changed dramatically since 2007 and some of the references in the original report date back as much as a decade earlier. To further complicate things, the newer report is still based upon that 2007 report.

As a technologist and engineer, I am aware of the opportunities and pitfalls that a completely digital storage mechanism offers. This is why our BRU product and the archival format that we created in 1985 are still in use today - more than 26 years later - in the handling of critical data for all aspects of the computing and digital storage realm. As to the reports' claims of format changes being problematic and inevitable, this is something that we are very proud of in that a tape written with BRU in 1988 can still be completely restored by the versions of BRU that we will release in 2012 and later. Combining this level of software and storage format consistency with the robustness of the latest and forthcoming LTO technologies results in long term archival storage that CAN be trusted. By that same logic, should we stop shooting in 2K and 4K because they are not compatible with the film formats of just 10 years ago?

Hopefully, the MPA will eventually reexamine the data upon which the reports are based and issue more modern and correct findings. Until then, the smart money's on LTO for long term archival and storage. Don't let a few software-caused tape failures turn you against a solution that has been proven reliable by literally millions of IT organizations.
 
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Tim, please contact the MPAA as soon as you can and let them know you have the answers:

Academy of Motion Picture Arts and Sciences
Attn.: Science & Technology Council
1313 N. Vine Street
Hollywood, CA 90028
(310) 247-3000
[address corrected]

Ask to speak to Milt Shefter, of the Digital Motion Picture Archive Project, or Andy Maltz, Director of the Academy Science and Technology Council. The staff will put you in touch with them.

Believe me, if this were a simple or easy subject, I think the studios would have solved it by now. But if you have a solution, you'll be famous and make an unimaginable amount of money (and I can imagine an awful lot).

While you're at it, call the record labels. There's a ton of album and single masters that are falling apart, too, and not enough work is being done to preserve those digitally, either.
 
Marc Wielage said:
Tim, please contact the MPAA as soon as you can and let them know you have the answers:

Motion Picture Prod. Assn. of America
15301 Ventura Blvd. - Building E
Sherman Oaks, CA 91403
(818) 995-6600

Ask to speak to Milt Shefter, of the Digital Motion Picture Archive Project, or Andy Maltz, Director of the Academy Science and Technology Council. The staff will put you in touch with them.
Click to expand...
Thanks for the contact pointers, we will get in touch with the MPAA folks as we've not had direct communications with them. It's not so much about having answers but rather about not putting out guidance documents based on invalid or outdated information. We're also in communication with the SMTPE team and I've also sent off a note to a couple of our studio contacts so that we can provide some real-world use cases for the MPAA team.

Believe me, if this were a simple or easy subject, I think the studios would have solved it by now. But if you have a solution, you'll be famous and make an unimaginable amount of money (and I can imagine an awful lot).
Click to expand...

It is a simple subject for those of us who understand it. Just like it's your job to make magic on the screen without the audience being weighed down with the technical magic of what you do behind the camera, it's our job to take the "rocket science" that is data management and make it accessible to everyone without requiring a BSCS to get things done.

As for the studios solving this, we see three main issues hindering a simple solution -

1 - It's tough to get the studios to agree on anything

2 - The studio production and archives and collections folks are now going to the IT team and getting bad suggestions based on the corporate backup infrastructure - not the same process by a long shot.

3 - The senior folks at the studios are only just now recognizing that digital is the way things are going and are just now looking for a solution.

We're actively working with 5 of the majors to try and get those issues sorted.

While you're at it, call the record labels. There's a ton of album and single masters that are falling apart, too, and not enough work is being done to preserve those digitally, either.
Click to expand...

As to the record labels and recording studios, we're already working with the AES and NARAS groups on just such a program. We don't discuss it much on the Film-oriented forums, but we sell a LOT of LTO and BRU technology to everyone from indie artists to the studios and labels. BRU is also used on a number of major artist tours to capture each performance to a pair of LTO tapes so that the performance can be archived in near real-time as well as having a copy traveling with the tour - just in case.

The unfortunate fact is that there is far more opportunity than hours in any given day. With the info you've provided above, we'll have a good starting point to try and help get this on a more mainstream track.
 
I've been part of conversations with a couple of studios on long-term archival backup processes, and they're very nervous and insecure about long-range solutions. They're even concerned as to what file formats to use! They're worried that if they use 4K DPX files today, maybe it'll be 6K or even 8K tomorrow, and all their old files will be worthless. (I know of a studio that used 2K compressed files ten years ago, and most of those have been discarded because they're now considered inadequate.) What I generally see being done is a) uncorrected conformed 4K DPX files, b) corrected conformed 4K DPX files, c) HDCam-SR HD tapes [in various aspect ratios], d) a 35mm negative film-out of the finished movie, and sometimes e) a 35mm IP of the finished movie. The files are generally provided on a firewire drive and LTO-4 or LTO-5 tapes (at least, when I last checked); the studio is responsible for longterm file backups. They also keep high-res HD files for TV delivery, and making new videotapes if necessary.

I was also reminded by a friend of mine yesterday about another project where the DTF backup files went bad in 3 years. That was a pretty big disaster, all quietly hushed up and redone. These things can get very messy. I take it that Sony has pretty much abandoned all support for DTF and DTF2 nowadays?

The RIAA has their "Grammy Producers & Technical Wing," which basically establishes working practices for dealing with music and sound session files, file formats, track layouts, storage requirements, and backup strategies. One of their documents is here:

http://www.grammy.org/files/pages/DeliveryRecommendations.pdf

This is woefully out of date, and talks about formats that have no meaning in today's world (DA88 tape, etc.). But it does point to the problem of relying on early digital formats that have fallen by the wayside. About 8 years ago, I worked on a major, major best picture restoration project, and it turned out that the early-1990s DASH audio tapes were essentially unplayable today. Luckily, the analog magnetic tracks sounded fine, and that's what we finally wound up using. That went out on Blu-ray a year or so ago, and nobody could tell, plus it sounded fine. Still, it points out the problem of choosing a bad format to begin with. And all this stuff is sitting on shelves, slowly falling apart. And if the tapes survive, but the machines no longer work... you're screwed.
 
Marc Wielage said:
I've been part of conversations with a couple of studios on long-term archival backup processes, and they're very nervous and insecure about long-range solutions. They're even concerned as to what file formats to use! They're worried that if they use 4K DPX files today, maybe it'll be 6K or even 8K tomorrow, and all their old files will be worthless. (I know of a studio that used 2K compressed files ten years ago, and most of those have been discarded because they're now considered inadequate.) What I generally see being done is a) uncorrected conformed 4K DPX files, b) corrected conformed 4K DPX files, c) HDCam-SR HD tapes [in various aspect ratios], d) a 35mm negative film-out of the finished movie, and sometimes e) a 35mm IP of the finished movie. The files are generally provided on a firewire drive and LTO-4 or LTO-5 tapes (at least, when I last checked); the studio is responsible for longterm file backups. They also keep high-res HD files for TV delivery, and making new videotapes if necessary.
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Ah - while archival vendors can't do anything about the actual clip formats generated by the cameras and various applications, it sounds like the powers that be should define a standard and a software layer that would be maintained by the technical group of that organization. While I understand that the R3D format is specific to RED, wouldn't it make sense to define a format that all digital media could be converted into that would stand the test of time while retaining the specific positives of the particular format?

I was also reminded by a friend of mine yesterday about another project where the DTF backup files went bad in 3 years. That was a pretty big disaster, all quietly hushed up and redone. These things can get very messy. I take it that Sony has pretty much abandoned all support for DTF and DTF2 nowadays?
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What do you mean by "went bad"? Did the media fail, or were there other issues in the way that the DTF files were written? This is why we stress LTO as the storage media - we have not seen tape-based failures on any LTO going all the way back to the LTO-1 engineering samples. Granted, the Q&A lab has turned up a number of tapes written poorly because of software assumptions, but we were able to get the incorrectly written data off of the media to show that the LTO media as not the cause of the failure to recover the data. As for Sony's decision to possibly abandon DTF, isn't it up to the technical wing of the MPAA or SMPTE to set a standard that would then be propagated forward for its members? If the MPAA defines DTF (which is a very good resolution-independent and long range storage format in my opinion) as the standard for its members, wouldn't that be placing a stake in the ground for longevity of digital storage?

In light of that, I would see a group creating a format specification and a matching open source API and cross platform dynamic / shared library defining the format that would be maintained into perpetuity so that the format can be read and written on any future platform by simply adjusting the porting parameters and recompiling on the new platform. Maybe actually selecting DPX as the saved format may simplify this further.

The RIAA has their "Grammy Producers & Technical Wing," which basically establishes working practices for dealing with music and sound session files, file formats, track layouts, storage requirements, and backup strategies. One of their documents is here:

http://www.grammy.org/files/pages/DeliveryRecommendations.pdf

This is woefully out of date, and talks about formats that have no meaning in today's world (DA88 tape, etc.). But it does point to the problem of relying on early digital formats that have fallen by the wayside. About 8 years ago, I worked on a major, major best picture restoration project, and it turned out that the early-1990s DASH audio tapes were essentially unplayable today. Luckily, the analog magnetic tracks sounded fine, and that's what we finally wound up using. That went out on Blu-ray a year or so ago, and nobody could tell, plus it sounded fine. Still, it points out the problem of choosing a bad format to begin with. And all this stuff is sitting on shelves, slowly falling apart. And if the tapes survive, but the machines no longer work... you're screwed.
Click to expand...
We're friends with George, John, and a number of the other P&T wing members. Having gone through three revision campaigns for that document, I can tell you that this goes right back to the first point I made about getting the studios to agree on anything like this. Getting the various member elements within NARAS to agree is a very difficult process.

Hopefully, our reaching out to these folks can be the tinder that starts the fires burning to actually move this forward in a positive manner.
 
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