Are we heading back to tape?

[Matt Brady]

Sony develops tapes that have 3,700 times more storage than a Blu-ray disc

Read more: Sony develops tapes that have 3,700 times more storage than Blu-ray disc | Mail Online
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[Adrian Tan]

Unless the price is ridiculous, I'm on board. Seems like a great archival solution if you want to retain raw footage.

[Danny O'Neill]

I can imagine that the costs will be high.

Given that an Ultrium 4 drive is around £1200 and tapes are £70 each the cost for archiving is pretty high.

For big companies who will use the drive 24 hours a day they will earn back their money. We used to use these in massive quantities in my old job.

[Dave Partington]

I'd like to bet the tapes of this capacity will be hugely expensive (per unit) though the cost per GB may be lower than disks.

Are we heading back to tape? Well, some of us never really left it. I just don't trust hard disks for long term archiving (I've had way too many die on me while sat on the shelf) and I'm currently archiving to LTO4 tapes with an eye on LTO6 since the cost of tapes has finally dropped far enough to make them more economical.

But, it's not the capacity that makes tapes so attractive for archiving, it's the shelf life. Tapes will usually far outlast Hard Disks when sat on the shelf, so if long term data archival is of interest, and you need more than a couple of gigabytes here and there, tapes are by far the best option.

Of course, the barrier to entry is the cost of the drive, but in reality it's no worse than buying another decent lens.

If all you do is archive the final edit (exported file) then DVDs and BDs are fine. If you want to archive the entire shoot then tape makes a lot of sense.

[Darren Levine]

if the deck is reasonably sized and the price competitive per gb, i'd be very onboard.