Tape or Tape-Less This time?

[Brian Drysdale]

Originally Posted by Erik Norgaard

This is very subjective depending on what you do. But, those "invaluable" personal family videos are not invaluable after all.

BR, Erik

It really depends if what you're storing is for personal or business use, production insurance usually have requirements as to how you back uo your data. However, just keeping everything on one drive is asking for trouble in the longer term.

For family movies, I guess old 8mm film shot on Kodachrome may out last the digital videos. The studios make 35mm RGB copies on B&W film for long term archiving.

You need to make a judgement on how much you can afford, but digital does have long term storage issues.

[Gene Gajewski]

Originally Posted by Brian Drysdale

I've just come from a talk on tapeless work flow. Obviously they wanted to underline any problems, but hard drives aren't the safest way to store, unless they're used regularly the bearings can dry out and quite a few people have had one go and lost their data. They are also prone to mechanical damage and can become worn out like any other mechanical device.

Amen, brother!

I'm pretty shure that large studios are going for tape in a big way. There's only so much you'd want to keep in an online storage library.

[Pete Cofrancesco]

Originally Posted by Erik Norgaard

Sorry, I work with mpeg2 natively in FCP, it works.

HDV is mpeg2 and supported at least since FCP6, I just switched to tapeless HD and while the default transfer setting does transcode into ProRes422 you can change that, I import my mpeg2 and work on it natively without any problems. .

I talking about STANDARD DEFINITION recorded in mpeg2. It will not import if you don't believe me you can try it yourself.