rtao said:
hi folks,
We need to digitialize our 1000hrs+ DV footage and we are looking for a good digital asset management solution at the same time. We will have FCP in our studio, but will it be a good digital asset management solution apart from a great editing software? It will be great if someone could give me some suggestion.
thx
First off. DV is 12GB per hour. So you are going to need at least 12,000 gigabytes of storage. That's 12 terabytes. This is a serious amount of space and you have to think about the future too. It you need 12Tb today you will likley need more so you want to select a storage system that can grow. The most common advice is to buy a system that is 50% full on day one. So you are looking at systems that can hold about 24TB. You don';t ned to fully populat the system with disk drives but you DO want slots for those drives.
With 50 drives in a box assume a drive lasts on average 3 years before it fails. You can expect then 50 failed drives every three years or one failed drive per month. How to dael with this?? the answer is RAID. You need a RAID system and you want 2 or 3 "hot spare" drives so the system can automatically rebuild failed drives and let you swap them out when you have the time.
Apple can sell you the storage you need but I'd seriouly recommend you look at solutions from Sun. You also need to concider backup. It should be clear you will not be using a UBS hard drive as a backup device. You are clearly in need of a robotic DLT tape system. and a plan that involves rotaing the tapes through some off-site location.
Yes storage s expensive but what did it cost to shoot all that video? I can't picture it being done for less than $100 per hour so what's that? A $100K investment
You could buy a few of these
http://www.apple.com/xserve/raid/ but concider something like this too
http://www.sun.com/storagetek/disk_systems/midrange/6140/features.xml
I'll let someone else talk about video asset magagment software. You don't say how many workstations will be accessing this data. I assume a small handfull of people will be editing and reviewing this at any one time. Either of the above system can support this with performance to spare.