New VTR to archive up to 2k

[Thomas Mathai]

I agree - harrdisks are not ideal solution, but today we can choose between bad sectors on harddisks or scratches on DVD/Bluray/HD-DVD.
If I compare price, availability, capacity and risc of failure then I choose harddisks.
Yoy can find 500GB external USB disks for $200

Look here http://www.tapeonline.com/d5.aspx for D-5 tapes price list
Or here http://www.tapeonline.com/hdcam-sr.aspx for HDCAM SR tapes

Based on the info I digged up on HD4Indies, HDCAM SR with MPEG-4 SP 4.27:1 compression is 50MB/sec datastream to tape.

That means 1 minute would be 3 Gigs, 1 hour = 180 Gig, etc. This would mean that a 155 minute @ 24P HDCam SR Tape would hold 465 Gigs.

Since the cost of the tape is $232, it's not that much of a difference from a 500GB USB drive.

Since a lot of people capture HDCAM SR uncompressed to a hard drive, it would be 180MB/sec @ 24fps, as per HD4Indies.

1 minute would be 10.8 Gigs, 1 hour = 648 Gigs, and a 155 minute tape =1.674 TB.

Of course you don't have to capture uncompressed.

 

[Tom Funk]

Lto-3

Lto-3

Has anyone been looking at LTO-3 or the upcoming LTO-4 (about 6 months away, late summer '07).

For LTO-3, the tapes natively hold 400GB (uncompressed data) and cost as low as $60 or so. (The drive device is a lot more, of course.) LTO-4 will double that to 800Gb, though I'm sure the cost of the tapes when this is first out will be more than double the $60 - new technology and all.

400GB = about 21 minutes of uncompressed RAW files, from my basic calculations. So about $180 / hour to archive.

The data rates for transfer are about 216GB / hr. Again, this is as an archive solution. That's a bit under 2 hours to archive 21 minutes or about 5.3x real-time.

As to reliability, here's some data from HP - ftp://ftp.compaq.com/pub/products/storageworks/ECN-11396-Consulting.pdf - though it's aimed to sell you on their tape brand, I think.



For anyone considering hard drives, though - I would personally suggest RAID 5 or 6! Though of course then physical storage of the drives becomes even more troublesome...

 

[GlennChan]

the Panasonic encoder is 14 FPS in 2K - not realtime

What's the source on this by the way? Non-realtime would be surprising for a deck.

 

[Jeff Kilgroe]

Has anyone been looking at LTO-3 or the upcoming LTO-4 (about 6 months away, late summer '07).

We had a huge discussion on this just within the last week or so. Seems opinions vary as usual, but the primary topic of discussion was possible backup at remote locations. For long-term archival in a studio or editing environment, I would say that a tape auto-loader library using LTO-3, DLT S4 or other current large format tapes is a no-brainer.

Is LTO-4 finalized yet? I've heard 800GB, but I've also heard that the capacity may be 1.2TB uncompressed. Now that would definitely be nice. Anyway, LTO-3 is a great one to consider if you need to buy right now. DLT-S4 holds 800GB per tape and are available now - also one to consider. They have similar transfer rates and options to LTO-3 and tapes are about the same $/GB. It seems that most consensus in the IT world is that LTO is still the most reliable tape format of the current offerings. There's a lot of AIT format heters out there I've noticed. But I wouldn't buy AIT anyway, few options for autoloaders and drives are generally more expensive to get the same capacities with a lower transfer rate.

I'll be needing a new archival solution to migrate from my 160GB VXA2 setup once I go RED. But I figure I still have a few months to sort it out.

 

[GlennChan]

Why does anyone want this 2K tape deck for 70K???? Is there some reason to own this????

Following the press release, it's "specifically for use with telecine systems". Shoot on film, do best light transfers to tape, offline edit, conform the edit, perform tape-to-tape grading, online editing. It's a workflow that works and it avoids having to re-scan/transfer the film (and telecine is expensive).

When you're doing your transfers, you might as well transfer onto the highest quality media possible (better than HDCAM, D-5, HDCAM SR), without killing your workflow. This deck should slide right into existing workflows.

2- The pricing is so high since the volume is so much lower. There's only so many telecine facilities around. If you look at Lustre (which targets the much smaller DI market), they only sold around 20 units in the first year after its release. Compare this to Red, whose R&D costs are spread out over thousands of units.

3- Perhaps there is a better way of doing things, but so far no one has come out with a working solution.

In the dailies transfer process for example, all the shots have to manually checked against a slate for audio sync. One workflow is to have a 3/4" deck (yes, umatic; it has deck control) recording simultaneously and manually shuttling back to verify sync.

A non-linear workflow might also save time by avoiding all the tape shuttling (in checking sync, and in the conform process).

 

[Tom Funk]

We had a huge discussion on this just within the last week or so.

Aah ... I've only just started going through the forums here, so hadn't seen it!

I got the late-summer time frame for LTO-4 from someone at HP, so it should be fairly accurate. I'd read something about the upgrade path of LTO-1 to LTO-6 w/ capacities doubling each time - and it specified LTO-4 as 800GB, so that's likely what it will be.

 

[Mark L. Pederson]

What's the source on this by the way? Non-realtime would be surprising for a deck.

It's NOT a deck - it's an encoder that ATTACHES to a D5 deck.

http://www.panasonic.com.sg/panason...il/MicroAnnouncementDetail.asp?ContentId=3134


It is NOT clear in this press release if it can record 2K at 24fps in REAL TIME - I was told by a Panasonic rep that it could only do 14fps in 2K - but that was a while back - this product was annouced a year ago at NAB 2006

Panasonic is taking a BIG HIT on D5 due to HDCAM SR - they just lowered the D5 deck price by $24,000

A deckless future makes me happy. Bring it on InPhase!

 

[istvanttt]

I used the LTO-3 on Macintosh with Restrospect and it worked fine. The specifications for LTO-3 says 400GB uncompressed and 800GB compressed. I never succeaded to get the 800GB with the Mcintosh anyway. The files I backed up where all QT 1080p, 10bit/log files.

 

[Jeff Kilgroe]

You'll never get the full compressed size on a tape with any platform or file unless you stick to just archiving ASCII text. The whole comrpessed capacity claims of tape systems are a carry-over from 20 years ago, when it really was something to get excited about. Just about the only thing that benefits from compression schemes during backup these days are database volumes. However, most newer database systems like MS SQL Server, Oracle, etc.. have compression built right in.

 

[GlennChan]

It's NOT a deck - it's an encoder that ATTACHES to a D5 deck.

The encoder goes hand in hand with the deck. Anyways... semantics.

I was told by a Panasonic rep that it could only do 14fps in 2K

If it is true, I would echo Graeme: That's ludicrous.
If it isn't true, then I wouldn't be surprised... because people are often wrong (myself included).

 

[Rodrigo Lizana]

The deck is 75K. it used to be 99K a year ago !.

 

[Rodrigo Lizana]

For a archiving masters, I don´t see a real solution today rather than film or tape.