Tape or Tapeless

Director goes back a few days later to look at footage again on first drive and the data is all GONE!

No reason can be found as to why the data is gone.

 

Only backup was what the editor still has.

No archive tapes to retrieve images from.

 

I don't like it.

Well same happens with HDCAM tapes, film etc. You only have one copy and if it's run through a magnet/environmental damage etc, it's junk. It's simpler to carry 2 copies of the content on 2 separate drives and have a 3rd backup. Costs are the price of a hard drive. I fail to see why this is such a bad thing?

Come on.... a tape you can kick it around, drop, break and even rejoin it.... a hard drive you have to treat it like a baby......it's chalk and cheese when comparing both storage mediums for robustness.

I'm not talking about water or fire or loss or backup, I'm talking about the fact it's allot easier to loose data on a drive than a tape due to how sensitive a hard drive is. It's full of electronics and has very fine torrence mechanical thingys in them, start carting, bouncing them around the place, and you are looking for trouble.

Cards or a camera that goes straight to optical disk is the way around it.

The new SONY optical disk cameras have a pre record buffer in them, pretty cool to hit record mid Whale breach only to still catch it all because of the pre record buffer.

Anyhow enough of this....I'm done...

It's full of electronics and has very fine torrence mechanical thingys in them, start carting, bouncing them around the place, and you are looking for trouble.

The cameras we use are full of electronics and mechanical things the housings you use have electronics and mechanical things the laptops have electronics... Its all electronics.. I suppose you won't be going for the EX3 and Amphibico housing when it comes out then ???? So whats your next upgrade wags...

Funniest thing i saw today was a man taking photos of RAF aircraft doing fly overs with a D3X with a monster lens..and it was pissing it down.. He had no waterproof cover on it at all,, it was dripping when he walked to his car... Is that camera enviromentally sealed... Doubt it...

Dive safe

DeanB

He had no waterproof cover on it at all,, it was dripping when he walked to his car... Is that camera enviromentally sealed... Doubt it

Dean,

My wife assures me that the D3 and D3X ARE environmentally sealed, even her D200 can be used in light rain! The D3X is aimed at the press and they need to use it in dodgy conditions and are not too careful with their kit.

What worries me is that she is looking at the spec.

Roger

Jeez how many threads do we have on tape vs media?

I do think this format discussion needs a huge dose of reality. Any particular spec doesn't say much if you don't take the format as a whole.

HDCAM tape is 3:1:1 144mb/s 1440x1080. Anyone going to say that it's not good enough for broadcast because it's 3:1:1 or 1440x1080? The bandwidth and colors from the 2/3" sensors alone makes the resolution and latitude. The 4:2:2 is interpolated from the 3:1:1 signal.

XDCAM HD has been 4:2:0 for years. Yet it's been in broadcast for as long as it's been around. Is GOP MPEG2 the "nightmare" that's been mentioned here? Well apparently many broadcast programs love having nightmarish codecs to punish themselves with the inaccurate 4:2:0 color resolution.

I know the HVX-200 is the camera of earth-touch and many other producers BECAUSE it is a pro format

DVCPRO100 (aka DVCPRO HD) from the HVX200 comes from a lower than HD resolution sensor (960x540), and the resolution tests show it. Pictures are softer than any other 3xSensor HD format camera. So while keying a 4:2:2 picture is easier, the overall resolution of the picture is less than many 3xSensor HDV cameras. So while the codec is 4:2:2, the actual resolution of the sample is 960x540 uprezzed to 1440x1080. Whereas the HDV sensors are either 960x1080 or 1440x1080, or in the EX series, 1920x1080. Also the 100mb/s bandwidth is a little deceptive in that it's a 60p codec. So anytime you shoot 30/25/24p, you throw out data the other frames, thus making it a 50/45/40mb/s codec since it can't use the full bandwidth. Pro codec it may be on a Varicam, but as far as most broadcast companies are concerned, the HVX200 is SD quality and not allowed to be an A camera.

PS: I was with the Earth Touch crew when they were using a Sony Z7 HDV camera as a topside camera just last week. Like their HVX200, they know it's a B camera and not for principal capture. Their program, WIld Touch, is broadcast in SD in South Africa. Their web productions are downrezzed to H264 QTmov. HDV could do as good a job in that scenario.

As an aside, the Beeb was using a HVR-V1 and Z1 to shoot the making of their project. I wonder if BBC production will block the making of portion? I believe the producers still preserve editorial as the most important aspect instead of HD to SD ratios.

All of you are arguing for formats that really should be matched to the type of project intended (including budget). The good thing is there is a HD format for almost every budget, even the 1000fps Phantom HD.

The EX1/EX3 at 1080 looks and performs better than RED at 2k. And it does it for 1/4 the price. That was enough for me.

I'd like to know whose test showed that, especially with a digiprime on the red.

I'd like to know whose test showed that, especially with a digiprime on the red.

Ifyou can get your hand on the HDVideoPro magazine for June 2008, you can read the article for yourself. However, DuArt Film and Video hosted "shootout" of sorts between the EX1, the RED ONE in Bayered 2K mode, the F900R and the new Vision3 Stock from Kodak. Andrew Young put the deal together. Andrew Young is the VP of Special Projects at DuArt, and a noted cinematographer with 2 Emmys, 5 Sundance Awards and a Academy Award Nomination.

This is a quote from the article written by Art Adams:

"Many who attended event said that the biggest surprise was the Sony EX1 looked better than the RED ONE in it's windowed 2k mode. Young noticed the RED being noisier, and Martinez thought the EX1 showed a lot more detail.

That's not surprising Martinez says. "The RED is using one sensor, windowed to 2K resolution and utilizing a Bayer pattern...."

...it goes on.

The "Martinez" mentioned is Juan Martinez, Senior Manager of Imaging Technology, Sony Electronics.

This event had some HEAVY hitters. This wasn't some jokers off the street.

http://events.creativecow.net/event/175/pi...or_memory_cards

http://forums.creativecow.net/readpost/142/858761

Ah ok. I think Adam Wilt wrote a quick, just for fun side by side in March or Feb and Art went from there. However, red herring alert and editorial headlines to boost sales in a mag, plus vested interest parties doing the comparison. Having seen the Red with a good lens shooting at 4k (2.5-3k effective), shooting in 2k mode is like cropping. May as well compare the 720P mode from the EX1 for resolution. But that's arguing on something that again needs no comparison. If people think that the Sony EX series has more resolution and DoF control than the Red, then let them buy the EX. Good DPs gets what they need within their budget for the look required. DV cameras were used many times for theatrical release features, as are HDV cameras.

The latest epic u/w film Oceans will only use 35mm and HDCAM. Try telling them the EX1 is better for their production and their technicians will throw a ton of info on why it's not. I would suggest to all to test their intended camera choices and release mediums and not rely on someone else's judgement in a magazine with advertisers.

Drew,

You and I both know that the EX1 is good. Is it RED? No. And it doesn't claim to be. The EX1 is a LONG way from 4k 4:4:4 through $15k primes.

Now that said, I've read article after article from people I admire who are cutting the EX1 in with some serious cameras. Yes, it's a B-Roll camera. But I seriously think it's making inroads in some places people didn't expect.

Ah ok. Red herrings and editorial headlines to boost sales in a mag, plus vested interest parties doing the comparison. Having seen the Red with a good lens shooting at 4k (2.5-3k effective), shooting in 2k mode is like cropping. May as well compare the 720P mode from the EX1 for resolution. But that's arguing on something that again needs no comparison. If people think that the Sony EX series has more resolution and DoF control than the Red, then let them buy the EX. Good DPs gets what they need within their budget for the look required. DV cameras were used many times for theatrical release features, as are HDV cameras.

The latest epic u/w film Oceans will only use 35mm and HDCAM. Try telling them the EX1 is better for their production and their technicians will throw a ton of info on why it's not.

Hey.... has anyone got some raw EX1 mxf footage I can play with.

I can supply a link to my FTP server to upload.

Update

I came across this link

Interesting read....would of been a whole lot easy if they were using tape.

http://www.dv.com/features/features_item.p...cleId=196604238

I know that article. It would've been a whole lot easier if they had done their research BEFORE the shoot even started. Pre-production is when you decide format, editing system etc etc for the budget. Final Cut 5 needed to render DVCPROHD to QT mov. That was no secret. These guys discovered this 1 week INTO the shoot? And all that equipment incompatibility should've been checked out BEFORE principal shooting started. Then they were using an older version of software that wasn't compatible fully. Sorry in my line of work, that's bordering on sloppy.

I'll give you an example on another production company that works with P2 and DV tape. Earth Touch uses the HVX200 for underwater and a Z7 for topside. They shoot and transfer to a laptop for satellite transfer at the end of the day. The P2 cards are d/l super quick and there's just a quick rewrapping. They choose the clips they want online and transcode to a lower codec for transmission. Then the next day at the HQ, they have the transcode dailies to use for the website and TV show. Archiving is done onto a firewire disk which is then transferred to a big server array.

Horses for courses Wags.

YEAH !! you tell that strapless.. topless...tapeless ozzie boy wonder Drew meister...

All he said above... AND SOME !!!!

Dive safe

Dean(still using tape for now)B

Haha well I'll tell you an ironic story...

Last week I was recording to tape and I was working with a guy from SKY News who was recording to P2 cards. Somehow someway I had a complete brain-fart and in the afternoon I recorded over the tape that I'd be using that morning. The SKY guy was taking the pee out of me something awful (all in good humour I should add) until the next morning when he handed me his 'empty' HDD. That evening after transferring his footage to HDD he'd somehow managed to delete the lot and ended up with nada from the whole days shoot. At least I still had my PM tape!! LOL

Moral of the story? Sometimes you just can't account for stupidity no matter what format you shoot on!

Cheers, Simon

P.S. Oh yeah and on the same day I lost about 5 mins of footage of Common Dolphins riding the bow wave of our boat due to not pressing REC. Amazing how all the "crap" managed to land on one day eh??

P.P.S I'm not normally this bad honest!!!

[edited by moderator for language]

Simon

It is still recoverable as long as it's not a sector format. That's the advantage of flash cards. There are recovery programs for just such a thing.

Well they certainly got all the toys there Drew, but I think the average joe citizen will not be using their cameras like that.

They got some great stuff on their site as well.

Most of these card and hardive cameras will be brought by the average bloke.

I picture joe citizen going out to shoot for fun, dive or maybe a corperate job, edit it then output to a DVD or Blu_Ray or Web.

A much smaller number may shoot for TV gigs or make a small indi film.

Anyhow the bottom line is yes it's a better codec on the cards.

Yes you can get it into the computer fast to edit....not AVCHD.

Yes you do have to lug around a heap of extra $$ delicate drives and a laptop or two.

How long did everyones hard drive Ipods last for?

No time in the end is saved as you have to archive it all back to a safe medium.....a hard drive or drives or arrays are not a safe medium.

Simon.....LOL.. I was always taught when you turn the camera back on Cue To Review especially a full size rig.

Wags

Sometimes you do confuse me. This whole thread you have been saying it's not a viable professional media because of the archiving issue. The solution is to back up to DLT, servers and the like. Just as the stills shooter do.

You then quote an article about how an indie film had trouble with the media, when really it was their lack of preparation, testing and foresight that was the issue.

I'll just link an answer I gave to you in another thread:

http://wetpixel.com/forums/index.php?showt...st&p=179467

Wags, statistically there is no safe medium. Tape can get wrangled in the player, dust, humidity. Hard drives fail but yet they keep all your data in servers and backups in governments and banks. That's why you have backup. Anyone who stocks and doesn't have at least 2 copies is merely playing with the odds.

I confuse myself sometimes....

I did not say it's not a viable professional medium just that it will take one a long time to archive it to a optical disk for most and be more expensive.

Carting a bunch of tapes around that place while out in the filed is alot easier than super delicate drives & laptops.

Most tapeless camera users will not be under the pump to get it into their NLE's to cut up.

Backing up stills is easy compared to the huge data of video.

Well the governments and big business can afford to have many backup-backups-backups but for the average user it's going to be $$$ to do.

So the time and money saved in getting into the computer will be lost when it comes to archiving it for the average user.

1 step forward and 3 backwards.....but it will be a better codec for some

Simon

It is still recoverable as long as it's not a sector format. That's the advantage of flash cards. There are recovery programs for just such a thing.

That evening he'd gone out and recorded footage of hoodies and a curfew for under 16 year olds in a local town. It wasn't recoverable after that apparently.

Cheers, Simon

Ah then he gets the kick in the butt award for not marking his cards. I thought you said he deleted it. If he has software protection for recent deletions, it's also possible to recover from his harddrive. It's little things like that which improve data protection.

Wags, if you read my link, a AVCHD camera can even edit in field without the need of a laptop. Couple that with $500 worth of SDHC cards, a camera like that removes the need for a laptop in the field. There are drives that can copy directly to the harddrive, I just bought 2 of them for my trip to Indonesia where I won't be able to use a laptop too long.

Are you so sure about stills being easier? On the ocean safari, one of the guys shot 1000 pictures on his Nikon D3 in 2 hours. That's 32GB in 2 hours ... same as an AVCHD camcorder. It's the same principle. Times have changed.

Keeping redundant copies of data on disk is statistically very safe. Yes, there are reasons why multiple disk failures are more likely than statistics suggest, but once you have copies of data on more than one disk you are more vulnerable to external causes such as fire, flood, loss, etc. than you are to a second disk failure. Claiming otherwise contradicts decades of computer science understanding. The only times when second disk failures are of concern are when recovery times become unusually long. In our application we can avoid that issue.

I don't see how a workflow that includes importing from solid state or hard drive, then making an online copy either syncronously or asyncronously could possibly be slower than importing from tape. I don't know how video works today, but when I did it a DV tape was not a sufficient backup because it didn't contain critical metadata generated after import.

Adding optical backups into the equation just confuses the issue. An optical backup is no safer than a hard drive backup but is much slower. People who believe otherwise ignore that such hard drives are specifically made for travel and can withstand enormous non-operating shocks. Optical drives are convenient for immediate distribution but they aren't necessary or preferable for an adequate backup strategy.

Today you can have a 2 drive hardware RAID 0, 2.5", firewire 800, bus-powered, 1TB mobile drive array. I don't know how much data is collected that needs to be archived on site but 1TB is a lot for most people. It's hard to believe that hard drive backup on location is bulkier than tape. Is 1TB worth of tape smaller than one or two external drive boxes?

Lastly, it's been many years since I've considered tape a viable backup media for ANY application. Hard drive has always been preferable for backup over tape but traditionally it has been cost-prohibitive. For years now there has been a trend toward using low cost drive arrays as a replacement for tape backup programs in some increasingly large applications. Tape is dying like film is.