Please don't let MiniDV tapes go away

[senseless]

I have 4 years worth of old HD and regular DV tapes that I haven't gotten around to editing yet. I can't imagine what I would have done if these were recorded on memory cards or the camera hard drive.

I recently dropped my backup drive on the floor after purging my main drive, losing a year of edited movies. At least I still had the original footage on the tapes. I'm not great at archiving and backing up, but who is?

Why this rush to abandon MiniDV tapes? Tape quality is better, they're very inexpensive and will serve as 25 year backups. Home made DVDS will start to break down in 5 years and how many drives have you crashed?

[ChemiosMurphy]

Tape quality is better,

Flat out no. Look at the Canon HF series stuff and the more pro series AVC-I or XDCam...

I recently dropped my backup drive on the floor after purging my main drive, losing a year of edited movies. At least I still had the original footage on the tapes. I'm not great at archiving and backing up, but who is?

But you lost the EDL. It doesn't matter if you still have the source footage, you lost the EDL.

I clone all my drives to prevent a meltdown catastrophe. I've never had to recapture due to failure of an HDD.

But what happens when your deck eats your tape or the tape just wears down? Each medium has its ups and downs....

[bigbossbmb]

Flat out no. Look at the Canon HF series stuff and the more pro series AVC-I or XDCam...

Uh, D5 and HDCAM SR.... what's your point?

I like how you say each has their ups and downs, but you say "flat out no" to tape is better. Tape is still a very very necessary medium. Tapeless is very convenient to those that can keep the media online all the time on various drives. For shows that shoot 500-600 hours/season (like the one I work on), that would be impossible.

[Dejavu]

The price ratio of hard drives/storage is to the point that it is cheaper than MiniDV.

One MiniDV holds ~ 13GB. A good quality tape will cost on average $3-$5.

One 1TB SATA drive average price is $100.

For the same amount of miniDV tapes: (1024/13) x $3 = $236 (or $394 @ $5 apiece).

So the argument that miniDV tape is cheaper is false. Extra hidden costs include capturing time, which is real-time, and prone to drop-outs. Tape based storage is dead.

[LethalWolfe]

Tape based storage is dead.
No it's not. The most reliable way to archive footage is on tape. Either video tape or data tape. HDDs are unreliable for long term storage and they only way I'd attempt to use this is using mirrored storage.

As bigbossbmb said, both mediums have their pros and cons and we are in a transitional phase, but it will be long time before solid state storage eclipses tape in every aspect.


Lethal

[CaptainChunk]

As bigbossbmb said, both mediums have their pros and cons and we are in a transitional phase, but it will be long time before solid state storage eclipses tape in every aspect.

Well said.

This transitional phase is actually quite scary. New tapeless workflows are encouraging the use of mechanical hard drives for raw footage archival. What happens if you accidentally drop a hard drive in the field? Chances are, the head gets jerked out of its parked position and there goes all your data. In the same situation, a tape would survive.

And this will continue to be the case until SSDs ship with acceptable performance and capacities at reasonable price points.

[MacNoobie]

Face it who uses miniDV these days besides soccer moms? Seriously for every x number of minutes/hours you record on the tape you need to spend y number of minutes/hours "recording" to your PC/Mac to work on it, sure you can walk away let it do its thing but thats still time you could use to edit the footage. That being said HDD based camera's probably wont fall apart before their tape counterparts (unless you're clumsy and drop the camera).

I wounder if RED uses miniDV.. oh wait no they dont.. sorry.

Tis true till SSD drives come up to par in performance/price we wont really see a better medium then HDD's.

[P-Worm]

Face it who uses miniDV these days besides soccer moms?

I do and so do many others. I'm a wedding videographer. For me, shooting 4-5 hours solid just doesn't work with non tape based. With a tape, to get another hour of shooting, all I need to do is pop in a new tape. With hard drive based, I need to load the footage onto a separate drive before continuing.

Why does it always feel like the people that think tape is officially dead seem to be those that don't do a lot of professional work?

P-Worm

[MIDI_EVIL]

I use tape too!

For now it is a much more reliable/safe medium. It's a great backup to compliment a digital backup of raw unedited footage.

I'm doing work for a museum archive department and we plan on using tapes for a long while yet.

[pigbat]

I definitely like tape but the clock is ticking on tape in consumer cameras. I was seriously thinking about an HV30 but I've decided to jump to a flash based instead. The future is now.

[thejadedmonkey]

I like tape too! Esecially for the "soccer mom" stuff that I like to do, it's great to have projects that only take up a gigabyte instead of ten or twenty (because it was HD too).

[sl1200mk2]

I too like tapes as long term archival and another form of backup aside from my final DVD or disk based media. I do worry about my consumer level camera transport wearing out at some point and losing my ability to easily have access to that media without buying another camera, device or paying someone else.

With a 4 yr old camera I'm nearly at the point of retiring it while it's still in good working order and making the move to a flash based device. That way I can have the prior camera for all my archive media should I ever need to revisit it within a the reasonable amount of time in the future.

Wayne

[Sdashiki]

People who say:

TAPE SUCKS YA OLD FART!

Obviously never used it, and more than likely doesnt even shoot video at all. They just read about the logic of the argument, figure they can come out on top, and bam, you have a detractor, but not an actual user.


Do what works for you, its all that matters anyway.

Pleading for tapes to not disappear is like asking vacuum tubes to not disappear. Something better WILL replace it. Personally, i think thats still a decade or more off.

[Keebler]

I have 4 years worth of old HD and regular DV tapes that I haven't gotten around to editing yet. I can't imagine what I would have done if these were recorded on memory cards or the camera hard drive.

I recently dropped my backup drive on the floor after purging my main drive, losing a year of edited movies. At least I still had the original footage on the tapes. I'm not great at archiving and backing up, but who is?

Why this rush to abandon MiniDV tapes? Tape quality is better, they're very inexpensive and will serve as 25 year backups. Home made DVDS will start to break down in 5 years and how many drives have you crashed?

i don't agree with the DVDs breaking down. I started transferring tapes for clients onto DVD 6 years ago and my DVD backups still work.

There are 'archival gold' DVDs out there now, but i think they're a crock of crapola designed to get ppl to spend more.

Myself, I like tape. Perhaps I don't understand the new HD and memory card camcorders, but I don't like how they compress the footage. I like having uncompressed footage to work with.

And I'm still on digital8 :)

When I transfer my own material, I plan to have a Raided system so it's backed up at least once.

Cheers,
Keebler

[gkarris]

Are DV tapes going away?

[CMD is me]

I was going to re-edit some video shot back in '00 on hi8 then backed up on miniDV. The minDV tape jams up every few minutes (other tapes work fine). I'd go back to the original hi8, but my old camcorder isn't working.

Having shot video since the early 90s I was unsure about "tapeless", however after using a couple HDD and flash based camcorders, I now MUCH prefer tapeless. At the consumer level, AVCHD is just as good, the files are easier to work with, and media is cheap. I can save my SDHC data to multiple DVDs for pennies and keep a live copy on a hard drive.

Hard drives can fail, tapes can fail, DVDs can fail. Backup backup backup. Find the workflow that works for you and don't worry about it.

[ClassicBean]

I'm no pro by any stretch of the imagination, but I opted for a MiniDV HD device (Canon HV20) when deciding on a camcorder to shoot my home movies.

I like the idea of having an actual tape backup in my possession in addition to what I capture on my external hard drive connected to my Mac. And in terms of fail rates, it was my understanding that hard drives are more prone to failing than tape.

It was also my understanding that hard drive camcorders compress the footage while recording and it's fairly noticeable, at least at the consumer level.

[ftaok]

It was also my understanding that hard drive camcorders compress the footage while recording and it's fairly noticeable, at least at the consumer level.

Your understanding is correct, the Hard Drive camcorders do compress the video. However, all digital camcorders compress the video.

For instance, your HDV camcorder uses MPEG-2 at 25 Mbps.

Canon's newest AVCHD camcorders (Flash and HDD) uses h264 at 24 Mbps.

I've read where AVCHD @ ~17Mbps is comparable to HDV ... and it's only getting better. The problem with HDV is that fewer companies are offering newer models, so the format is not advancing as fast as AVCHD (not sure if they can do much to improve the video quality of the HDV format anyways). The bottom line is that companies are putting more resources in developing AVCHD cams and soon you won't be able to buy a new, consumer level HDV camcorder.

ft

[student_trap]

hmmm, and the debate continues.

Personally I have just bought an avchd camcorder (sd9) after previously using my girlfriends miniDV and my very old hi8 camcorders.

As far as i can tell, the current benefits of avchd are very nice (battery life/size/importing etc), while the current downfalls such as quality and backing up are only becoming less important as the units get better and cheaper.

We seem to be in the middle of a massive change in the way video is captured, so that tape is a falling format that is undergoing very little innovation, while avchd is becoming a much stronger format and will only continue to do so.

Right now if i were to buy a camcorder for serious work, i'd probably get a mini dv one, however in a couple of years my guess is that most here will be recommending the latest sd or hard drive based unit from canon/pany/sony, just as a year and a half ago any request for camera info would be met by HV20 HV20 HV20!

I bought a avhcd because in my price bracket, i couldn't get a mini dv camera that had dv-in and was hidef, so it was a bit of a non-starter. I figure ill use my hidef avchd camcorder for a couple of years and then buy into a much higher quality cam when the market has chosen its direction.

just my opinion

Student_trap

P.S. I think the biggest problem facing tape is that it remains the last bastion of old technology in the digital age, so that most amateurs would go avchd simply because its closer to the way most other digital tech works. As these amateurs grow up and buy more professional units, they will similarly go tapeless

[Sdashiki]

There are 'archival gold' DVDs out there now, but i think they're a crock of crapola designed to get ppl to spend more.


cant say ive seen these before, but I knew from research "back in the day before DL DVD burning was even possible" that masters of DVDs, like CDs, are made of Gold and/or glass.

Something "permanent" vs something liable to break down over time. Im sure the original glass/gold masters for any CD/DVD in the last 20 years is still just as good as the day it was made.

For instance, your HDV camcorder uses MPEG-2 at 25 Mbps.

MPEG2 is an end codec; worthless for easy editing


Canon's newest AVCHD camcorders (Flash and HDD) uses h264 at 24 Mbps.


h264 is a nice codec, that is so highly compressed you need a fairly recent machine to play it back at full speed, let alone edit it easily

compression is compression. but more is more.

DV is 5:1, MPEG2 is 8:1 at best, h264 is even worse

[rick3000]

I think this is very simple. If you are a casual consumer a HHD based camcorder makes sense, you record, edit, burn a DVD (and/or export to iTunes) and delete the footage.

For prosumers/pros a HDD is too big of a risk. A tape is vastly more reliable because if you drop it your footage will not be corrupted/deleted/etc. Plus, many pro's want a permanent 25 year archive.


One MiniDV holds ~ 13GB. A good quality tape will cost on average $3-$5.

One 1TB SATA drive average price is $100.

For the same amount of miniDV tapes: (1024/13) x $3 = $236 (or $394 @ $5 apiece).
But you have to replace the HDD every 5 or so years, because they go bad, and that means you spend $500 on HDD over 25 years vs. $236 for a 25 year tape archive. Now if SSD prices some down that may be a worthy alternative to tapes.

It all depends on what you want.

[Dejavu]

But you have to replace the HDD every 5 or so years, because they go bad, and that means you spend $500 on HDD over 25 years vs. $236 for a 25 year tape archive.

It all depends on what you want.

Your math is wrong because hard drive ratio of storage/price doubles every 8-12 months. Every five years, you can copy to new drives costing much less.

How do you intend to play back miniDV tapes in 25 years? There won't be any miniDV players, and even if you had a deck, there are no guarantees you could play it back since every manufacturer of camcorders, decks and tape have different tolerances. If you have any doubts, check out the playback incompatibilities of Canon miniDV products with other vendors.

[LethalWolfe]

This transitional phase is actually quite scary. New tapeless workflows are encouraging the use of mechanical hard drives for raw footage archival. What happens if you accidentally drop a hard drive in the field?
It's not mishandling of the drives it's just the fact that HDDs are not designed for archival storage and have, in some cases, died while just sitting on the shelf. They are designed to be used, not to be dormant in a closet for years on end.


I wounder if RED uses miniDV.. oh wait no they dont.. sorry.

A proper RED workflow utilizes data tapes for camera masters and 99.9999% of everything you've seen on TV has been mastered to some tape format.


Why does it always feel like the people that think tape is officially dead seem to be those that don't do a lot of professional work?

Because they lack enough practical experience to understand how the real world works and have gleaned just enough information off the 'net to think they are experts?


When I transfer my own material, I plan to have a Raided system so it's backed up at least once.

Working on a RAID1 is good for redundancy, it's not good for a back up. For example, if you are working off a RAID1 and you accidently delete a file that file is gone for good. You could use RAID1 as a back up as long as you kept it separate from the media you were working with. For example, you capture to, and work from, some internal drives but back up the footage to a RAID1. Then you could unmount the RAID, keep one of the HDDs on hand in case you needed it and put the other HDD in a different physical location.

Are DV tapes going away?
Eventually, yes.


Hard drives can fail, tapes can fail, DVDs can fail. Backup backup backup. Find the workflow that works for you and don't worry about it.
Yeah, multiple copies on multiple mediums is the safest way to go. Everything will fail eventually and the goal is to have enough back ups that having them all fail at the same time is almost impossible. I've had optical media fail, I've had HDDs fail, I've had tapes w/errors on them. Although in terms of percentages tape has been by far the most reliable for me. I've literally worked with tens of thousands of tapes so far in my career and, off the top of my head, I can only think of maybe a dozen or two where a tape wasn't perfect and if you don't count a mechanical error (a deck or camera not playing back or recording properly) the number isn't even that high. Depending on the medium I think the rule of thumb is to migrate all your archives onto new media every 5-10 years if you are storing things digitally.


It was also my understanding that hard drive camcorders compress the footage while recording and it's fairly noticeable, at least at the consumer level.
Older HDD cameras that were SD and shot DVD-quality MPEG2 were much inferior in terms of quality to their MiniDV counterparts, but newer cameras that use AVCHD don't suffer the same quality inequality compared to their tape-based brothers.


MPEG2 is an end codec; worthless for easy editing
.
.
.
compression is compression. but more is more.
There are different flavors of MPEG2 (Sony's IMX and HDCAM formats are both intra-frame compressions based on MPEG2) and more compression doesn't necessarily mean a lower quality image. Avid DNxHD, RedCode, ProRes, and Cineform are all examples of compressed codecs that hold up as well as uncompressed codecs unless you are doing something like extreme VFX work where you literally need every single pixel you can get.

As you pointed out though, a down side to more complex compression schemes is that they require more CPU power to handle them.


Lethal

EDIT: Man, what did we do before the "quote" feature? :D

[gkarris]

Are DV tapes going away?


My question still, are DV tapes being discontinued???

[LethalWolfe]

My question still, are DV tapes being discontinued???
Asked and answered.

But, again. Eventually, someday yes. Anytime in the near future, no.


Lethal

[Dejavu]

My question still, are DV tapes being discontinued???

VHS tapes are still being manufactured. What's your point?

[gkarris]

VHS tapes are still being manufactured. What's your point?

A question. The OP made the impression that they are being discontinued...

[namethisfile]

Face it who uses miniDV these days besides soccer moms?

David Lynch and Steven Soderbergh to name a couple

Seriously for every x number of minutes/hours you record on the tape you need to spend y number of minutes/hours "recording" to your PC/Mac to work on it, sure you can walk away let it do its thing but thats still time you could use to edit the footage.

every editor in the whole world know that it's very important to see the raw footage before it's all mangled up and edited and a good opportunity to see this is during the digitization process.

[bbq2k]

compression is compression. but more is more.

DV is 5:1, MPEG2 is 8:1 at best, h264 is even worse

This is misleading. Compression isn't the same across the board, which is why they continue to develop new codecs. The H264 codec is the most brilliant yet devised for con/prosumer use, but it will be improved upon. If you think DV is superior to H264 based solely on compression ratio, then you should stop using JPG in favor of GIF. :rolleyes:

I used DV for over ten years professionally and now I can't wait for SD to become the prosumer standard. I use SD AVCHD for home movies (Vixia HF100) and am consistently blown away by the quality and the tremendous improvement in workflow. Goodbye log and cap!

The thread starter should take heart that, as others have pointed out, MiniDV will be around for a few more years. Hire a teenager to capture all your old tapes!

Finally, the 800 lb gorilla in the room is data storage. Storage technology just hasn't kept up with even mainstream consumers' needs. An object the size of a MiniDV tape that holds less than 15 GB of data is sorely inadequate.

[bbq2k]

every editor in the whole world know that it's very important to see the raw footage before it's all mangled up and edited and a good opportunity to see this is during the digitization process.

Yes, but an even better opportunity to see the raw footage is when you can slice and dice in real time. Saves a lot of time, and allows for a different kind of thinking (e.g. more immediate).

[LethalWolfe]

Yes, but an even better opportunity to see the raw footage is when you can slice and dice in real time. Saves a lot of time, and allows for a different kind of thinking (e.g. more immediate).
It saves a lot of time unless you have dozens of clips w/useless alphanumeric names from the camera that all have to be re-named before they can be brought in to edit. I'd kill for the ability to import clips that were shot consecutively as one large clip. For example, I just got some tapes back from CES. We digitized in the whole tape as one clip and armed w/the shoot notes the editors know exactly what is where on the tape. When we shoot tapeless we have dozens of clips per hour of shot footage that all have to be renamed so all the time saved by capturing at faster than real time is pretty much lost by having to rename all the tapes. And then the projects get congested faster and editing efficiency drops because you are sifting thru dozens of small clips as opposed to a few large clips.

Right now almost everything is a trade off since we are still in the growing pains stage. It'll get better eventually but today, ugh...


Lethal

[namethisfile]

It saves a lot of time unless you have dozens of clips w/useless alphanumeric names from the camera that all have to be re-named before they can be brought in to edit. I'd kill for the ability to import clips that were shot consecutively as one large clip. For example, I just got some tapes back from CES. We digitized in the whole tape as one clip and armed w/the shoot notes the editors know exactly what is where on the tape. When we shoot tapeless we have dozens of clips per hour of shot footage that all have to be renamed so all the time saved by capturing at faster than real time is pretty much lost by having to rename all the tapes. And then the projects get congested faster and editing efficiency drops because you are sifting thru dozens of small clips as opposed to a few large clips.

Right now almost everything is a trade off since we are still in the growing pains stage. It'll get better eventually but today, ugh...

Lethal

you bring up a valid point with tapeless footage. someone still has to rename those clips. with tape footage, the renaming might happen during capture. or not. regardless, i don't think that time spent capturing footage is lost time. in fact, it could be a very productive time where the editor can "cut and splice or throw away" the footage in his head, while the clip is still being digitized.

[namethisfile]

Yes, but an even better opportunity to see the raw footage is when you can slice and dice in real time. Saves a lot of time, and allows for a different kind of thinking (e.g. more immediate).

sure. but you can also get immediate feedback during this so called "capture window." as mentioned before, it is a good opporunity to splice and dice in one's mind and then when the digitization is complete, the person can immediately go to work cutting and splicing because he or she had done it before in his head.

[Sesshi]

No it's not. The most reliable way to archive footage is on tape. Either video tape or data tape. HDDs are unreliable for long term storage and they only way I'd attempt to use this is using mirrored storage.

As bigbossbmb said, both mediums have their pros and cons and we are in a transitional phase, but it will be long time before solid state storage eclipses tape in every aspect.


Lethal

I was mentioning this elsewhere but I think the time already has come to those who're more professionally tech-literate.

Possibly the reason for the lack of uptake is the lack of confidence in data protection / backup solutions due to the availability in the main of somewhat fisher-price solutions definitely under OS X, and furthermore the lack of knowledge to implement them. I don't have that problem since I use Vegas in preference to FCS and use proper nonstop solutions on key machines (including the machine which has all my video diatribes on) under Windows, including the possibility of complete recovery (in minutes, assuming the kit is back and working) even in the case of total RAID failure using technology far less flaky than Time Machine.

I shoot video on a Sony HDV which records to tape as well as to memory - one of the main reasons I bought it, being conditioned for the master archival practice. However although I still archive tapes, I'm not really seeing a truly justifiable need for it anymore given the data protection infrastructure that we have. Once the prices for the sort of technology we currently use filters down to the small-video-house level of SME and then gets dumbed down enough for OS X (and to a certain extent Apple finally abandons the license restrictions on virtualising OS X clients), I don't think it'll take much more than a couple of years for digital videographers to realise that tape is almost totally redundant, although I still see a ready market for a while for dual media recorders aimed at those who still need, as a belt & braces approach, tape archival.

[bbq2k]

sure. but you can also get immediate feedback during this so called "capture window." as mentioned before, it is a good opporunity to splice and dice in one's mind and then when the digitization is complete, the person can immediately go to work cutting and splicing because he or she had done it before in his head.

I agree with you. I worked like this for years and years--it's how we all started out. Now that I have learned to work with tapeless, though, I think my workflow is faster. We could get into the minutia of what really makes for "better" editing... but let's not. ;)

[LethalWolfe]

However although I still archive tapes, I'm not really seeing a truly justifiable need for it anymore given the data protection infrastructure that we have. Once the prices for the sort of technology we currently use filters down to the small-video-house level of SME and then gets dumbed down enough for OS X (and to a certain extent Apple finally abandons the license restrictions on virtualising OS X clients), I don't think it'll take much more than a couple of years for digital videographers to realise that tape is almost totally redundant, although I still see a ready market for a while for dual media recorders aimed at those who still need, as a belt & braces approach, tape archival.
It all depends on the situation though. For a low volume shop dealing w/formats that leave a relatively small footprint going to a tapeless archiving model will become viable sooner than a high volume shop dealing w/formats that leave a relatively large footprint. W/that being said, data tape is still the best solution for digital archiving so tape as a medium is going to be w/us for a long time. Sure, Reds and Vipers shoot tapeless but those digital files get stored on mirrored data tapes as soon as they come out of the camera.

I worked on a show once where we had 2500hrs of footage. At the end of the show we boxed up all the videotapes and they went to a climate controlled storage facility (if the show had a larger budget the tapes would have been cloned first w/the clones going to one facility and the masters going to another). At online quality we'd need about 100TBs of storage to hold all of it. Tapes in boxes seems like a more cost effective solution than properly building and maintaining a 100TB server indefinitely (or two mirrored servers in two different geographical locations ideally). At the company I work at now we literally have thousands of tapes in our library and shoot about 1000hrs of new stuff each year. That's a lot of data.

Assuming solid state media proves to have a long shelf life then that's what will probably replace videotape all around once prices come down. Shoot on an SD card, dump the contents onto your computer then put the card on the shelf as your camera master.


Lethal

[Sesshi]

Well - while individual DV tapes are the easiest to get people's heads around, the alternative doesn't have to be online storage.

You can even stick to tapes, albeit of a different kind: There are already solutions in OS X beta http://www.tolisgroup.com/products/macosx/pe/ for archiving from NLE (and others) to e.g. an autoloader.

[LethalWolfe]

Well - while individual DV tapes are the easiest to get people's heads around, the alternative doesn't have to be online storage.
Just to be clear, when I used the term "online" I was using it in the post production sense meaning "full quality" not in the computer sense of "the internet". If you don't use camera tapes as masters what you are left with are DVDs (which are too small), BR-DVDs (which are unproven and still pricey), HDDs (which are unreliable) solid state media (which hasn't reached a right price-per-gig yet) and data tapes (which are out of the price range of consumers as well as many prosumers). Assuming you shot on a quality tape stock it's hard to beat that bang-for-your-buck when your shooting stock is your archival stock and all you need to do is put in it a box in a climate controlled environment. As tapeless cameras become more common I think we'll see more people adapt data tape (they'll buy a DLT drive instead of a tape deck) and hopefully that increase in the consumer base will force prices down.


You can even stick to tapes, albeit of a different kind: There are already solutions in OS X beta http://www.tolisgroup.com/products/macosx/pe/ for archiving from NLE (and others) to e.g. an autoloader.
Yeah, I've mentioned data tape a few times already in this thread. ;)


Lethal

[thedarkhorse]

I'm still using minidv for my hdv canon hv30, but sooner or later I'm moving on(to tapeless and prosumer level).
Tape is starting to reach it's limits for what cameras can do.
The next standard for me is probably going to be sdhc cards, with prices continually dropping it's going to seen be viable to shoot to a card, and shelf the card afterwards for archiving.
JVC's new camera coming out(JVC's GY-HM100 (http://pro.jvc.com/prof/attributes/features.jsp?model_id=MDL101845)) shoots the high quality xdcam ex format straight to quicktime files in any common HD resolution or framerate.
1920x1080 60i-50i-30p-25p-24p, 1440x1080 60i-50i, 720p 60-50-30-25-24

You can't get that format flexibility and instant access in final cut with tape, it's literally drag and drop and you're ready to edit. Also this camera shoots up to 35mbps as apposed to miniDV's limit of 25mbps.

Now to be honest until this camera was revealed a few days ago I wasn't over tape, no tapeless solutions really 'got it' because you still had to transcode or rewrap files before editing them, there wasn't instant access.
I have high hopes for this camera, but I hope it sets the standard of how camera makers should approach the formats their cameras shoot from now on.

[Sesshi]

Just to be clear, when I used the term "online" I was using it in the post production sense meaning "full quality" not in the computer sense of "the internet". If you don't use camera tapes as masters what you are left with are DVDs (which are too small), BR-DVDs (which are unproven and still pricey), HDDs (which are unreliable) solid state media (which hasn't reached a right price-per-gig yet) and data tapes (which are out of the price range of consumers as well as many prosumers). Assuming you shot on a quality tape stock it's hard to beat that bang-for-your-buck when your shooting stock is your archival stock and all you need to do is put in it a box in a climate controlled environment. As tapeless cameras become more common I think we'll see more people adapt data tape (they'll buy a DLT drive instead of a tape deck) and hopefully that increase in the consumer base will force prices down.


Yeah, I've mentioned data tape a few times already in this thread. ;)


Lethal

By online I actually meant in the digital broadcast terminology - i.e. 'HDD's that are actually connected to stuff which spins them and reads data from them', referencing your datacenter mention.

I didn't see your data tape reference and although as a regular user of LTO's I actually have less confidence in them as opposed to (my / broadcast definition of) online and nearline storage, I think the tape mentality will keep solutions in that regard viable for a long time.

[LethalWolfe]

I'm still using minidv for my hdv canon hv30, but sooner or later I'm moving on(to tapeless and prosumer level).
Tape is starting to reach it's limits for what cameras can do.
The next standard for me is probably going to be sdhc cards, with prices continually dropping it's going to seen be viable to shoot to a card, and shelf the card afterwards for archiving.
JVC's new camera coming out(JVC's GY-HM100 (http://pro.jvc.com/prof/attributes/features.jsp?model_id=MDL101845)) shoots the high quality xdcam ex format straight to quicktime files in any common HD resolution or framerate.
1920x1080 60i-50i-30p-25p-24p, 1440x1080 60i-50i, 720p 60-50-30-25-24

You can't get that format flexibility and instant access in final cut with tape, it's literally drag and drop and you're ready to edit. Also this camera shoots up to 35mbps as apposed to miniDV's limit of 25mbps.

Now to be honest until this camera was revealed a few days ago I wasn't over tape, no tapeless solutions really 'got it' because you still had to transcode or rewrap files before editing them, there wasn't instant access.
I have high hopes for this camera, but I hope it sets the standard of how camera makers should approach the formats their cameras shoot from now on.
That JVC does look like it could be a good camera, the 1/4" CCDs are a bit worrisome though. One of the biggest reasons EX1 footage looks so nice is because it uses 1/2", a full raster 1920x1080 sensor. The big brother to that JVC will have 1/3" CCDs in it which is a 'standard' size for prosumer cameras. The transcoding/rewrapping is as much Apple's fault as it is the camera makers. For example, footage from P2 cards can be imported directly into other NLEs (such as Avid) but it has to be re-wrapped for FCP. Having to transcode AVCHD footage into AIC or ProRes is just what has to be done to make editing that type of footage viable on todays machines. The compression scheme is so CPU taxing that editing it would be painfully slow. Also, the 35Mbps codec that JVC uses isn't the same codec that the EX1 uses but they are both 35Mbps and full raster.

By online I actually meant in the digital broadcast terminology - i.e. 'HDD's that are actually connected to stuff which spins them and reads data from them', referencing your datacenter mention.

I didn't see your data tape reference and although as a regular user of LTO's I actually have less confidence in them as opposed to (my / broadcast definition of) online and nearline storage, I think the tape mentality will keep solutions in that regard viable for a long time.
Ah, online... one word, so many definitions. Maintaining a large (and perpetually growing if you never move anything offline) online and nearline system though gets complicated and expensive does it not? Especially when backing up/archiving 'done right' dictates multiple copies in different geographical locations. Like I said before, on a relatively small scale it's doable today, but when you start talking about hundreds, if not thousands, of TBs of data that's just going to be sitting there and rarely, if ever, accessed, it just seems like a waste resources. I mean, do the editors working on the 8th season of Scrubs really need online or nearline access to all the dailies from the pilot episode? The majority of productions today still use a traditional online/offline workflow. It's a big step from only onlining what you need for the final cut to onlining everything ever shot for that particular TV show, movie, etc.,. Whether it's a tape, a can of film, or a holographic disc I think there will always be a need for a long-life format that you can just put on a shelf. At least in industries like the entertainment industry.


Lethal

[MacNoobie]

David Lynch and Steven Soderbergh to name a couple



every editor in the whole world know that it's very important to see the raw footage before it's all mangled up and edited and a good opportunity to see this is during the digitization process.


A couple of guys I've never heard of.. maybe Lynch his name kinda rings a bell but the other guys doesn't.

As far as digitizing its still a time consuming effort and as I've said we can all grab coffee come back and have it done but still I'd rather work on a video while the juices are still flowing you know what I mean?

[LethalWolfe]

A couple of guys I've never heard of.. maybe Lynch his name kinda rings a bell but the other guys doesn't.
I'd suggest you Google them and add some of their movies to your Netflix queue as they are both among the more talented and prominent directors of the last 30 years or so.


As far as digitizing its still a time consuming effort and as I've said we can all grab coffee come back and have it done but still I'd rather work on a video while the juices are still flowing you know what I mean?
Or you can watch the footage, get a feel for it, take brief notes regarding your initial impressions so that when you get your hands on it you already have a familiarity w/it. Think about ways to be productive instead of reasons why you can't be.;)


Lethal

[MacNoobie]

I'd suggest you Google them and add some of their movies to your Netflix queue as they are both among the more talented and prominent directors of the last 30 years or so.


Or you can watch the footage, get a feel for it, take brief notes regarding your initial impressions so that when you get your hands on it you already have a familiarity w/it. Think about ways to be productive instead of reasons why you can't be.;)


Lethal

I'll check em out :)

As for the video you can always scrub through it when its done downloading and get right to work :D time is money :eek:

[Rizvi1]

I myself prefer minidv. I had a fire at my house recently which damaged both my Canon XH A1 and my Sony HC1. I'm looking to replace them both, but will probably go the minidv route.

I have 4 years worth of old HD and regular DV tapes that I haven't gotten around to editing yet...

This is one of the drawbacks to me of minidv. I have so much video that I've recorded over the years that I'll probably never get to. this is because it's not convenient to connect a camera, import, etc.

I wish I had something that recorded to both tape and a removable format so that I could always have the tape backup, but have something readily available to work with too - something small I could leave in my laptop bag to import when I had a chance. Recording to HDD isn't ideal for me either since whenever i had to do something, I would need the camera on me.

....

I shoot video on a Sony HDV which records to tape as well as to memory - ....

memory being hard drive or removable format? One of the reasons I am leaning towards the XH A1s instead of getting another XH A1 is that (from what I understand) it's supposed to be easier to record via firewire to a hard drive too. Now when I record w/ my XH A1, I'd be somewhere stationary so I could definitely take advantage of this. But when I use the prosumer camera I'm looking to buy (to replace the HC1), I probably couldn't record via firewire to a hard drive. So, again, I would love something that recorded to both a small, removable media as well as tape.

I was going to re-edit some video shot back in '00 on hi8 then backed up on miniDV. The minDV tape jams up every few minutes (other tapes work fine). I'd go back to the original hi8, but my old camcorder isn't working....

heh, I have this same project for a movie me and a few friends shot over the summer of 2000 (although the "movie" we ultimately made is so horrible that I just want to make the whole thing into a short, fun, YouTube-ish trailer). I have all the raw footage in hi8 but don't have a hi8 camcorder anymore. I did export the final product to minidv so could work with that. But I thought it'd be good to just work w/ the raw footage again.

[sushi]

The price ratio of hard drives/storage is to the point that it is cheaper than MiniDV.

One MiniDV holds ~ 13GB. A good quality tape will cost on average $3-$5.

One 1TB SATA drive average price is $100.

For the same amount of miniDV tapes: (1024/13) x $3 = $236 (or $394 @ $5 apiece).

So the argument that miniDV tape is cheaper is false. Extra hidden costs include capturing time, which is real-time, and prone to drop-outs. Tape based storage is dead.
Don't forget, that if you use HDs to capture and archive your video, you will need more than one for back up purposes.

So if you purchase a 1TB SATA hard drive and capture video you would need at least one other 1TB hard drive to back up your video. So it would cost a bit more than this.

Plus once you have finished your video, you can back it up the MiniDV tapes. The tapes will last a long time compared to a hard drive.

And if you want you can always us DV tape which holds a lot more video.

[2jaded2care]

Don't worry, I won't let MiniDV tapes go away. I just have to tweak this letter to my congressman in WordPerfect, changing "8-track tape" to read "MiniDV tape"...

;)