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.
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
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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?
