Organizing Footage
 

We recently purchased an X-Serve RAID system with 4 TB of space from apple for video storage. We've been ping ponging ideas back and forth about a good system for capturing and storing footage in an organized manner, but nothing really seems to stick. I work in an in-house production department in an advertising agency. We shoot alot of footage for many clients and have recently been capturing the entire tape to the X-Serve RAID.

We're concerned that we are going to fill it up too quickly, however we want access to this footage so all of our editors can reach it quickly without having to sift through hours of tape. We have thought about just time coding the tape and capturing only what we think we need, and then keeping the tapes in storage somewhere as well, but it seems like there would be a better method.

We have also recently started shooting to our firestore (sometimes in HD), so in that case, there really is no backup tape.

DVD backups are just not enough anymore with HD footage. We purchased several external hard drives to back things up to, but that seems to get cluttered quickly as well.

I'm curious what you guys do for organizing your footage. I look forward to hearing different methods in hopes that we can get an efficient system figured out here.

Thanks,

Joel

Not sure what the video houses etc use, but if it were me I'd look at one of the small tape libraries built around the LTO drives made by Quantum or IBM or HP. Current models store between .8 and 2 (or more) Terabytes per cartridge using lossless compression. You can get libraries from 8 to 48 cartridges in size for reasonable $$$. The magazines themselves are removable and can be stored on the shelf with anywhere from 4 to 12 cartridges per magazine.

Or you can use a simple LTO tape drive (I know that Dell sells them) and store the cartridges manually.

As I recall the HP 8 cartridge unit sells for around $5k with one drive.

Don't confuse the LTO tape drives with the kind of tape drives found in video cameras - any video cameras at any price. The LTO drives use totally different technology and are extremely reliable and built for serious day in and day out continuous use as a computer back up device. They have data rates in the vicinity of (as I recall) up to 80mb per second. Drives like this can run continuously for years with no maintenance except the occasional use of a cleaning cartridge.

Disclosure: I work for a company that is partnered with IBM in the development and manufacture of their LTO tape drives and have been personally involved with the development of these products for over 10 years.