Death of tape - Part 2

[Vince Pachiano]

Being a noob to this forum, I am perhaps not qualified to ask this question....

But I see that Mini DV camera's are going bye-bye.
Looking down the road, how can one txfr Mini-DV tapes to the computer
I see that used Sony GVD300 going for $600 and up
I also see some low-end MIni DV camera's going for $299
Do I buy this camera, hermetically seal it, and put it on a shelf for 1,5,10 years?

[Aaron Holmes]

Using a camera that records to Mini-DV certainly doesn't mean that you need to use the Mini-DV tapes as a backup. Capture them into your computer right away and never look back if you're that worried about it. Otherwise, while I certainly wouldn't recommend getting started in tape if you aren't fully invested in it already, I think it'll be a looooooong time before getting your hands on a Mini-DV camera becomes difficult (in case you sell yours, it poops out, etc., and yet you still have tapes you want to capture or re-capture). Heck, I was just helping my father find a reel-to-reel audio tape recorder/player on craiglist so that he could play back and digitize some of his old work. They're everywhere!

Best,
Aaron

[Vince Pachiano]

Originally Posted by Aaron Holmes

Using a camera that records to Mini-DV certainly doesn't mean that you need to use the Mini-DV tapes as a backup. Capture them into your computer right away and never look back if you're that worried about it.
Aaron

Thanks for the reply. Just to be clear, I already capture MY Mini-DV to HDD (and properly archive the files).
I'm thinking more in 5 years when my mother-in-law comes over with 200 tapes and cries that she cannot watch them any more. Not sure if I am ready to capture all of her tapes right now...

[Aaron Holmes]

I see. I actually just went through this exercise myself with 90-something Video8 and Hi8 tapes from my childhood. Not too fun, especially as this was all analog! Basically, I bought a used Canopus A/D converter and Hi8 deck off ebay for a total of around $600, captured everything, then sold the equipment for what I paid for it (basically lost the shipping costs and that was all--well, and about two weeks of my free time!). So that may be your path at some point, if keeping a MiniDV camcorder around and in working order doesn't or can't happen for some reason. There are also places that you can pay to throw the contents of your MiniDV tapes onto DVDs. Never used such a service, so I can't offer any advice there.

Ultimately, I don't think there's a recording media today that doesn't promise this same sort of dilemma, to some extent.

Best,
Aaron

[Perrone Ford]

Originally Posted by Aaron Holmes

Ultimately, I don't think there's a recording media today that doesn't promise this same sort of dilemma, to some extent.

Well,

This is why I use optical media. I can take a DVD I burned 5 years ago, and put it in ANY PC or Mac and get my files. I can transcode them to a different codec if I choose, or I can move them forward to BluRay, or whatever the medium of the day is.

Proprietary hardware is a problem. Always was, always will be. I don't have if it's 3/4", Beta, DVCProHD, HDCam, you name it. Get that stuff OFF tape and get it onto something that abstracts the hardware from the encoded file.

My short term archives right now are to BluRay. Buying in bulk, that's about $1 - $1.50 a disk. Cheaper than miniDV tapes without the hassles. Since they format out to about 22.5GB, you can put the raw contents of the DV tape, as well as a rendered version, your project file, associate media, and a freeware player like VLC on every disk and make it fully self contained.

I said goodbye to tape in 2004 and never looked back.

[Aaron Holmes]

Hi Perrone:

Perhaps my experience is a fluke thing, but I had half a stack of unused TDK-brand DVD-R's go bad on me (after sitting on a shelf in my office for three years--never particularly hot, cold, or humid), and so my confidence in DVD recordables as a backup solution was shot forever. I have, however, lately seen "archival quality" recordables being advertised by a number of manufacturers, so ... hmmm... But I'll never be buying TDK media again!

My own solution, which is sustainable for me due to my fairly low-volume hobby, has been to pick up 1TB RAID 1 ESATA external hard disk arrays, fill them up, then shelve them. Of course, I'm now tied to ESATA, to the Windows NTFS filesystem, and to whatever proprietary RAID 1 data structures the controllers in the hard disk enclosures use, so here's hoping none of *that* stuff poops out or goes out of style! :-)

It is terribly annoying, but media will continue to evolve, and at some not-too-distant time, reading whatever it is that you've stored your video on--unless you've been migrating it regularly--*will* be at least a minor inconvenience, if not a serious undertaking. How I wish it wasn't so!!

The U.S. government has enormous amounts of data backed up on these gigantic 18" 4Gb optical WORM discs in caddies. They "solved" the problem by getting Toshiba to sign a contract stipulating that they would manufacture drives capable of reading the WORM discs for 100 years! Gotta love government. :-/

Best,
Aaron

[Perrone Ford]

Hard drives are not archival. And the lubricant used in them dries out if you leave them to sit. I choose optical because it is cheap, has zero moving parts, can move from place to place with ease, fits in any computer worldwide, is impervious to dust, water, and other contaminates which would kill a tape dead, impervious to magnetic influences (like when people clean your office and leave move your tape on top of your CRT!), etc.

I moved to BluRay optical archive in 2008. Best thing I ever did. LOVING that workflow now. It was a bit pricey when I did it, but boy is it paying off handsomely now.

[Martyn Hull]

All my hd material is on BD from 2005 but i have doubts these discs will much longer than DVDs, leaving tape in 2004 means no hd until 2007 i think, my HV30 cam is still loved despite having a T2i/550D

[Alessandro Machi]

One time I had the experience of playing back old 8mm tapes that would clog the heads in a digital 8 camcorder. I would switch to a clamshell unit instead and the tapes would play ok.

[Jim Andrada]

No optical media that you can burn is archival. No hard drive is archival. High end tape like LTO is reasonably but not perfectly archival.

And if you throw "future proofing" into the definition of archival., no electronic medium ever invented is archival.

Unlike the popular notion of an archive as a bunch of inactive data that just quietly sit around in a dark place for X years, archives have to be active in order to be archival. Meaning that the data are continually scanned and checked to guard against "bit rot", and migrated to new technology as the previous technology ages and gets "retired", and on and on and on.

And if the archival system doesn't do this automatically, then the users (ie, US) have to do it manually. And it's a PITA!

[Perrone Ford]

Originally Posted by Jim Andrada

No optical media that you can burn is archival. No hard drive is archival. High end tape like LTO is reasonably but not perfectly archival.

And if you throw "future proofing" into the definition of archival., no electronic medium ever invented is archival.

Unlike the popular notion of an archive as a bunch of inactive data that just quietly sit around in a dark place for X years, archives have to be active in order to be archival. Meaning that the data are continually scanned and checked to guard against "bit rot", and migrated to new technology as the previous technology ages and gets "retired", and on and on and on.

And if the archival system doesn't do this automatically, then the users (ie, US) have to do it manually. And it's a PITA!

This is very true. And it's why I caution in nearly every thread on the subject where I post about using BluRay. You need to move it forward. But at the current pricing, that's at least a possibility. LTO is a good solution in terms of longevity, but the proprietary tape machines, and the difficulty of checking the media, along with the expense, make it very impractical for most people.

Sadly, a lot of my work is "really archival" so I have to deal with it that way, but most people don't have to.

[Jim Andrada]

Good points, Perrone.

Up to now,using LTO has been complicated by the need to utilize backup software that supports it, but in the last few months, IBM has announced LTFS or Linear Tape File System which allocates a separate partition on the cartridge which in effect allows a directory structure on the cartridge - which means that files can be dragged and dropped to and from tape. This simplifies the task of getting data to tape, but someone still needs to do the dragging and dropping. They have also talked about making the file system "MXF aware" meaning in essence that the MXF metadata can be stored in the directory partition so time code range retrieval will be possible without requiring a whole file to be retrieved. It isn't all that clear at the moment (at least to me) how the MXF awareness can be utilized, but if anyone is interested I can certainly find out more about it.

LTFS is approved as standard by the LTO (Linear Tape Open) consortium, although I think IBM is furthest ahead in actually deploying it.

Disclosure - my real job has been involved with LTO since it was a gleam in the eye of the three companies making up the consortium - IBM, HP, and Seagate (whose tape business is now owned by Quantum) so I naturally think it's great stuff! Also - Quantum has offered a somewhat similar capability for cartridge based file systems for a few years now, but I believe that the IBM technology (which is available to all consortium members) is a more robust design.

But back to archiving --- there are products in the market that I think hold out a lot of promise for being capable of developing into real archive appliances that could address the almost total automation of setting up, configuring, remotely replicating, and migrating archives to new generations of storage technology and may enable real archive appliances that would be capable of ingest and playback/retrieval at data rates that would meet or exceed the data rates required for even uncompressed video. We aren't there yet, but there is a lot of interest in the technical community on getting there.

While most implementations of the base technologies have focused on high end systems, there are some promising developments that I think could lead to the availability of systems at the lower end of the spectrum - maybe not in the $1k or $2k range, but definitely at price points consistent with the cost of a professional camera/lens setup.