HVX Longform... it just wont cut it... yet...

[Sergio Perez]

Originally Posted by Bill Southworth

I wonder if the P2 Store can be user upgraded with a Seagate 160GB 2.5" drive. Anyone opened up the P2 Store? Hopefully the software in the P2 would recognize that it has a larger drive when the drive is formatted.

The only issue I've had with 8GB P2 cards is for continuous recording (eg concert). But the same problem exists with tapes, just not as often. For the bulk of my shooting, the 40 minutes I have in the camera (at 720/25pn) seems quite comfortable. The ease of editing later is awesome. It feels more like sorting stills than capturing tape.

As for backup, I just ordered a terabyte RAID array. I'll probably just keep everything I decide to use (or save) while editing in FCP rather than everything off the cards.

My calculation are not researched very carefully but HDD looks pretty cheap per hour of 720/24:

- HDD at approximately $1 to $1.50 per GB, or $4.50 per hour of recording. This is based on 500GB drive pricing.
- DVCPRO HD tapes at $80 per hour of recording
- DVCPRO tape at $20 per hour of recording
- mini-DV at $9 per hour for quality tape

I think the limit of the current P2store is stablished not only because of the hard drive in it but also because o f the limitation of its software design to be compatible with the 4gb cards (Which can only dump 15 times?). There might be some kind of software upgrade needed to be done in order for it to accept beyond the 60gb limitation (not only swapping internal hardware...)

[Barry Green]

Originally Posted by Barry Werger

huh?

An hour of 100Mbps is about 52GB - $52 - $80 at your GB price...

He said 720/24p. So an hour of 40mbps is about $21 at $1 per gig, but that's if you're buying 500gb drives. If you're buying 300gb drives it drops to about $12 per hour.

[Bill Southworth]

I shouldn't try calculations after midnight. Even at $12 to $20 per hour, HDD is in the ballpark with tape and much more convenient. This also assumes that each tape is full, which is very rarely the case for me.

The only real issue is the "all the eggs" in one basket situation. That's where RAID comes in.

It's all going to get a lot better fast, as the P2 cards get bigger and the disks get cheaper. But I think tapeless has arrived, at least for me.

[Barry Werger]

Originally Posted by Barry Green

He said 720/24p. So an hour of 40mbps is about $21 at $1 per gig, but that's if you're buying 500gb drives. If you're buying 300gb drives it drops to about $12 per hour.

Ah, yes... quite right! I was thinking of recording rather than just backup... which will be at 100Mbps unless the recording device can remove pulldown. But he did say he's happy with his 40-minute P2 recording time.

[Mark Grant]

But on that last point, I'd be long dead before either a Blue-Ray's pits were unusable or a HDD's platter lost it's magnetic integrity.

Even if your hard drive still spins up in ten years, how do you plan to read it? Maybe it will still be supported if it's NTFS on SATA, but parallel IDE will be long dead by then, possibly SCSI too. And readable platters won't help you much if the bearings are stuck or the electronics are dead.

Personally I'd much rather trust long-term storage to Blue-Ray or tape than hard drives. We seem to be setting ourselves up for a future where much of our history is lost because it's simply unreadable after a couple of decades.

[Peter Ferling]

Agree. In my experience, any drives lasting longer than five-years shelf (two years for continous use) is rare. I have drawers full of them, and I also have the tapes. A few times I have to rebuild projects from the tapes, and the support files which are also archived to DVDs. Still, rarely do any of my projects last much beyond three years. By then the product, message, etc has changed and it is completely rescripted. So choose your archive based on the project life.

However, I can tell you that I have cheap VHS tapes from the 80's that play back brand new today. Even so, VHS is a dying/dead format, but I can still buy new VHS/Beta decks to reclaim the media from those tapes. The PC architecture is changing much to quickly to even suggest the same kind of accessibility.

What happens when tape itself (not just VHS) is put to pasture?

[Robert Lane]

Two words: Media Transfer.

Nothing that is *current* today will be so 20 years from now. Since 70% of all media available today is a digital format, be it HDD, optical or tape, it's certainly not a huge thing to migrate footage from one media type to another and thankfully the process is lossless.

IDE, SATAII and SCSI going away? No problem, x-fer off to whatever comes down the pike. Blu-Ray, HD-DVD, XD-Disc being replaced by a TB disc format? Same thing - transfer!

The nice thing about technology today is that most of us have the ability to do these transfers right off our main edit systems and no longer require going to a specialized transfer house or service bureau.

Of course, I'm glad service bureaus still exist: Has anyone ever had a client show up with Hi-8 tapes and asked for a wedding edit or worse, transfer to DVD? I've never even owned a Hi-8 deck much less have one now! (big laughs)

Personally, I think the future of storage is solid state. Tapes are going away and spinning disks of any kind are going to be passe too. I ran across an article from NASA researchers working with German engineers to create the next-gen of RAM. Imagine one TB of RAM that is about the size of a current CF card - storage heaven.

[Mark Grant]

Two words: Media Transfer.

Great if you've got the time and money to waste continually transferring the data: but if you're going to do that, why do you even care how long the media will last? Your original claim was that data on hard drives would outlast you and Blue-Ray disks... but to be actually readable you'll have to transfer to a different medium way before the data on a Blue-Ray disk will have 'rotted'.

[Robert Lane]

Just how often would you really need to make a transfer? Once every 10 years or so? Heck, even if it's every 5 years that's neither a huge investment of either time or money.

We're not talking about migrating an entire library every other year when the next cool-fad hits the market, we're talking about long-term storage of archives.

My point about the longevity of digital media is that barring any unusual behavior like bearings freezing up (I have a handful of HDD's from the days of the Amiga and x486 machines and they still spin up under command and x-fer data just like they did when they were new) the actual data will outlast any human's life-span. Tape on the other hand won't. But that's an academic debate and not real world requirements.

The reality is for those who need viable library access and storage there are also built-in upgrade paths in the form of media migration which done on an archival schedule is neither costly nor time-consuming over the long term.