Workflow LTO6

[Vincent Larsson]

From the link:

Raw Trimming

Instead of copying the entire clip YoYottaID can trim the files, creating new smaller clips without transcoding. The Conform tool uses the In and Out point from the timeline to reduce the size of the clip.
To do this turn on Trim clips in the Conform panel.
This way you can bring raw into grading sessions without the large file size overhead. YoYottaID can also make two identical trimmed conforms, one on the RAID and one on an external drive. Again saving huge amounts of time.
YoYottaID Conform will trim ALEXA Mini MXF, ARRIRAW, DPX, RED R3D, Apple ProRes (including 4444 XQ), Sony F700/F5/F55/F65 MPEG2, SStP, RAW and XAVC files.
When trimming ALEXA Mini MXF YoYottaID will automatically create individual ARRIRAW files​

 

[Björn Benckert]

From the link:

Raw Trimming

Instead of copying the entire clip YoYottaID can trim the files, creating new smaller clips without transcoding. The Conform tool uses the In and Out point from the timeline to reduce the size of the clip.
To do this turn on Trim clips in the Conform panel.
This way you can bring raw into grading sessions without the large file size overhead. YoYottaID can also make two identical trimmed conforms, one on the RAID and one on an external drive. Again saving huge amounts of time.
YoYottaID Conform will trim ALEXA Mini MXF, ARRIRAW, DPX, RED R3D, Apple ProRes (including 4444 XQ), Sony F700/F5/F55/F65 MPEG2, SStP, RAW and XAVC files.
When trimming ALEXA Mini MXF YoYottaID will automatically create individual ARRIRAW files​

Hmm. And you mean resolve would not cut the same task of extracting the trimmed files?

 

[Elsie N]

Hmm. And you mean resolve would not cut the same task of extracting the trimmed files?

Premiere has had this option since a long time ago.

EDIT: But I'm talking about after an edit... maybe you are talking about previous to doing a full edit.

 

[Jeff Kilgroe]

You guys are so overcomplicating all of this. Use your LTO tapes as backup only and move on with your lives. Trying to go back and forth from tape within your workflows will only slow you down and drive you insane. Trying to index and retrieve individual files does work, but it's painfully slow. Not sure what pace you guys work at, but LTO is too slow for me to even consider having on set.

 

[Derek Morrison]

Jeff, am I wrong in saying that backing up R3D to LTO, you won't get compression to use all of that 6.25TB on the tape. I have compression on but I'm only still seeing 2.25TB in LTO6.

 

[Alex Kiritz]

Jeff, am I wrong in saying that backing up R3D to LTO, you won't get compression to use all of that 6.25TB on the tape. I have compression on but I'm only still seeing 2.25TB in LTO6.

Jeff has answered this before.

Tape is pretty straight forward these days, but you do need to know a bit about interfaces, brands, etc.. And if you're connecting to a Mac, the combination of tape drive and host adapter are definitely something to pay attention to because not all will play nicely together in the Mac environment.

LTO tapes have a native capacity and compressed capacity, you will want to figure everything based on the native capacity. Compression is done on the fly via a relatively arcane RLE process and files that are already highly compressed like ZIP, JPG, MP4, R3D, etc.. won't endure further compression while being written to tape, so you don't gain anything there. Text based, files like HTML or Word documents, database files and other such things that are not compressed to begin with will see compression there, sometimes as high as 3:1. That makes little difference in the grand scheme of things for most users doing what we do here -- our large and already highly compressed or "dense" media files tend to dwarf everything else.

That said, on an LTO-6 tape, you can figure getting around 2.1 to 2.2 TB written to each tape. Sometimes a bit more.

As for that mLogic tape mTape thing, it will probably be OK when or if it ever does show up. If it does show up, it's going to be very late and probably not worth the wait. And it's nothing more than a Thunderbolt PCIe to SAS bridge bundled into the same enclosure with the tape drive itself. So it saves you having to go from Thunderbolt to a PCIe expansion box like a Magma or Sonnet with a SAS host card inside, then to a tape unit. It does not eliminate the middle-man in terms of eliminating the PCIe expansion box, it just puts it inside the same box as the tape drive.

LTO tape for archive purposes has been growing in popularity over the past few years, but the key companies making tape drives are very closed-minded when it comes to considering new interfaces. I've personally suggested to some of the guys at HP's storage division that they need LTO drives, as well as SSDs and HDDs, that use PCIe interfaces with the ability to direct-attach to Thunderbolt. They thought I was nuts. …And here we are, nearly 2 years after I had that specific meeting and while we don't have any PCIe/Thunderbolt tape mechanisms in sight, SSDs have already gone that way, and HDDs are following suit.

 

[Björn Benckert]

Jeff has answered this before.

Jeff, any comments on YoYottaID?

As I will have a 40TB raid when we start the project and the episodes comes in now after the other. Possibly can keep what I´m current need in source on the raid. But I don't know if I get 200TB or 400TB or 600TB of footage... All I know is I will use a fraction of it. So having an assistant extrating the trimmed r3ds for each episode from LTO tapes seams like a slim task if it works even if it´s slow, in that sense it´s not such tight schedule.

Only fitting 2TB on the tapes does not sound to good. I thought it could pack the r3d´s to about 6 tb onto the tapes. But I could be wrong on that fact. Again only got this briefly explained to me.

 

[Christian Kuss]

Hey Björn,

we have been working with LTO-6 (LTO-7 recently) and LTFS for years on several RED jobs. It is a perfect solution far archiving and backing up large amounts of data near set.
The LTO streamers are quite noisy though - we have used Tandberg and Quantum drives.
On a LTO 6 LTFS tape you have about 2,2Tb of storage if you back up R3Ds. As mentioned by Jeff compression will have a neglectable effect in that scenario.
Thus I highly recommend using LTO-7. The write/read speed is way faster(at average 200-220mb/s) and you will have about 5.8TB of usable space.

However I seriously doubt that you will be able to conform directly from a ltfs mounted tape in reasonable amount of time. These tapes if they are nearly full can sometimes take up to 10/15mins just to mount from my experience
let alone changing folders in a mac finder window etc. We just use them for straight sequential backup (write or read) purposes for that reason.

 

[Björn Benckert]

We are not planing on doing LTOs on set. On set we got a big raid and also make small "shuttle drives" that arive at my post facility where we got another big raid. But client want 3 copies of all rushes one that goes to a our safty vault, one that goes to another office and one that we grab selected takes from when we do the online / conform.

Simply the lto's will be more like low cost safty copies that we extract selects from. I done the same in 4k dpx from dtfII back in the days so sure i understand tapes are not like a fast raid. But then again I might get a few hundred tb of footage and having it all online I tried before and that also puts the indexing to a halt. So small discs/tapes and a few terabyte on each and extract sellects with a few frames of tails is what Im after.

But possibly I should get the lto7 as thats bigger tapes.

Its hundred shooting days mostly in cars at night... Im guessing multiple cameras, low compression etc... then the amount of footage can be quit stagering.

this deck: http://www.mlogic.com/products/mtape-thunderbolt-lto-7
Yo Yotta
and a pegasus HDD x8 to work from.