Tuesday, July 15, 2008

9 comments:

Anonymous said...

My first question is why XDcam,it sounds like you were using P2 and DVCPro tape??? If you need to archive, why not use existing resources in DVCPro tape??? If you can not afford hard drive/ server based storage then I would say use tape based storage. XDCam is a big investment and depending on the size of your company, it most likely would be cheaper to build a peta server. I'm not a big fan of XDCam as it is proprietary to Sony, expensive and many colleagues I have worked with experience file lose with the discs. It is my opinion that you need purchased P2 equipment to transition into the file based world. I believe we will be completely file based in 10 years though we will always have tape in our archive. Sony is betting on the sale of the XDCam as P2 is so far ahead of them technology wise, they want you to feel that you need to keep your media on the XDCam disc. For what it is worth, XDCam is a great solution for the small budget operations but as we've seen in the past they will change up their formats as soon as you have invested in their current lineup. From a buisness standpoint it is risky to invest in either P2 or XDCam. P2 is so far ahead of the supporting technology available for it. XDCam is 20+ old technology on a state of the art disc. So if you can wait out this storm another year I'm sure different solutions will present themselves to you. The biggest factor in our industry today is the ability to shoot HD with a compression that allows maximum storage capability. AVC I frame will be the biggest stepping stone for many and it is currently becoming the standard in many post production houses. I think all the manufactures of equipment will admit that MPEGII has served its use. It will be a couple more years until MPEGII is gone from our daily processes, so again just sit back and wait a while for technology to catch up to panasonic. If you are going to make the change to XDCam, wait about 4 years when they have developed there own form of AVC.
Best of Luck,
Richard

Anonymous said...

Interesting topic! I run all XDCam gear and want to transition to P2. I like the idea of no moving parts in my camera and deck, plus with 64GB cards times I believe 4 slot in the camera, I can shoot a lot of footage with out changing out media on the camera. I guess I never thought much about archiving so thank you for this post, I agree though that archiving to tape is probably the cheapest best storage format. I still use the large Beta SP tapes for archiving masters until we can afford to upgrade to something else and I can fit 2 hours of footage on the tape and most post houses still have Beta SP capability. In my experience it all costs money and a lot of it. It would be nice to know if someone will put out some sort of cheap archival media product,I think Sandisk is working with Sony on the EX products which I think is a lot like P2. If that is the case they may be able to make a P2 card very cheaply for Panasonic??? Would this help??? I know it would probably make a difference for a lot of people. I admit, my company doesn't deal in saving much footage but it brings up a good point.

Anonymous said...

Do you have a media library??? What are you going to do with the tapes in 20yrs when they start going bad??? In the original post a central media server was mentioned it sounds to me like a archive server would work really well to be able to access footage stored long term??? XDCam / P2??? Both good formats and both have advantages. I still have producers who need to hold the footage in their hands so XD Cam is good for this. P2 is quick and virtually maintenance free with low power consumption across the board. Both good but not great. If either was really super than the top pro camera packages would use the format???

Anonymous said...

Hello
I have worked in the broadcast industry as both a photog and engineer for the past 30 years. Those of you in my same position will know what I'm saying when I write that storage or in this case archival media have changed serveral times often in drastic fashion. Frankly speaking, I see this as a way for manufactures to stay one step ahead of customers at all times. Now if I am reading this post correctly we have a user who is worried about long term storage of footage. In my opinion it doesn't matter what you acquire your footage with anymore, infact, if you are using Panasonic P2 I think you are setting yourself up to be flexible to any format and I'm just forcasting it will be a viable solution for many years to come. Let me mention this. XDCam or better yet, HD XDCam to be more specific is a good recording format, I wouldn't say the best but it does offer the ability to take the disc, edit your material and then toss it in your archive or place it on a shelf. Here is my rub, it is just another format and like history has shown us what will be next, and I can almost asure you something else is lurking around the corner. Now that we have all purchased our XD line of players, surely something better and more expensive is waiting to tap into our pocket books. Remember, Sony is also starting to push the EX line of solid state cards much like those used by Panasonic. If we see a trend here it is that our industry is moving to temporary storage for recording. I just like you Aaron see a problem with having something fixed to put on a shelf though for me I think the answer is to build a robus server with plenty of backup. I say this believing that a server system will offer you far more flexibilty down the road and I don't think we have much traveling to do before our road of having tapes on a shelf runs out. I think you will save a great deal of time and money in the longterm if you go server based storage now. Yes a little more money and time up front but that is where I would place my cards. Something that concerns me and I'm not completely up to date with the P2 and EX line of recording products; however, they are designed to work with PCMCIA card slots on computers. If you've purchased a new computer lately, you may notice that express card buses are replacing the PCMCIA card slots. This in a way is a bad move by the computer industry as the new version is much more fragile. However, who is driving the technology in this rat race and will P2 and EX have to change card formats to keep up with the computer industry? Just a thought, good luck and keep us posted here.

Stan

Anonymous said...

I think xdcam will be around for a while, its a good niche market for Sony. Long Term archiving is a interesting topic for everybody because it in one way shape or form touches all of us to some extent. I work on the gathering side of broadcast and do not deal with long term storage but it is something I hope we can get a hardware expert or consultant to talk about here. Sorry I don't have an answer.

Anonymous said...

The answer will eventually be managed offline/ near line storage. Reasonably priced mass storage array, for example a company called Isilon systems from Seattle is making such servers with many, many redundant options. The bigger part will be how to manage the content that you put there. There are several options in the market place not for doing this. The technology is here, but many of the news broadcast manufacture have a hard time understanding the current workflow or how to implement new work flow that works in the fast paced news environment.

Anonymous said...

Does anyone know a media rep from Isilon Systems. I think it would be interesting to post some information about their system here on the blog site. Thanks for all of your input.

Aaron

Anonymous said...

Isilon is not an archive .. certainly not inexpensive.

Anonymous said...

Hi,

Thanks for starting this conversation, the problem of tapeless content capture is one I have been meaning to touch upon in our blog for a while.

A response:
http://www.matrixstore.net/2008/09/12/left-on-the-shelf/

Comments welcome..

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