storage question
 

lets say you would shoot an average of 240 hours of video a month for a year which would be 2880 hours annually among all the field producers at a company and you would want to keep every bit of video shot and have it placed on a shelf in a tangible form. Also you would want to keep all the video at the touch of a finger for editors (2880 hours on a Lanshare system) who are in different regions of the country, how would you pull that off? Also does anyone make a device where you could put your blueray disk in a deck and download it to its own server where lets say 9 editors could read from the same server but the info they would be using would be a copy of what was on the server, the server info would remain in an untouched form, then maybe twice a year you could spend a couple of days dumping the footage from the server down to tapes to be logged on a shelf in a tangible form. XDcam sounds great but with 10 field producers and 9 editors how in the world would you keep track of all the 1's and 0's and backup all the footage.

John,

The original XDCAM media is your backup. I'm not sure there's a need to dump all your XDCAM to a SAN and then worrying about backing the SAN up.

Thanks, one question that still arrises is, What would it take to get 2000+ hours of footage in a storage device where someone 1000miles away could open it up on there editing platform and have all the footage we have to play with. Thats what we are looking for is a storage device that would hold that much info for lets say a year then copy it over to another drive that would always be accessable year after year. In other words we would have a master tangible shelving system for the Disks and also have the same footage stored optically for years to come. So a tangible and optical library which have the same info, optically everyone in our loop of a 1000 mile radius could access the optical, and our shelves would keep the tangible library. We have a Lanshare and edit with Avid Adrenalines. Thanks

I would check with Sony to see if they have a cart machine in the works.

This is a robotic system that has a large store of disks that it calls into play when requested. TV stations had them for Beta tapes.

Then if that is hooked up to a fiberoptic network, somewhat similar to what Skywalker ranch has to share files with LA studios you might have a system that fulfill your needs with only the original XDCAM being needed.

Or you could download the XDCAM data into mpeg servers as well.

"I'm not an expert, I just play one on TV"

aloha,

Keith

PDW-F70 Deck Works With:
PDJ-A640

"The PDJ-A640 has the capacity for up to 4 PDW-1500 and/or PDW-F70 decks, with bins to hold up to 640 discs included in the standard product. In other words capacity is provided to load up to 1,200 hours of program material making this an ideal solution for anear-line storage & archive applications."

Wow, looks like XD cam could be the _ _ _ _ ! One more question. If you had 9 edit rooms with all Avid adrenalines working on completly different projects, how many decks would you need, how fast is digitizing compaired to tape digitizing. Seems to me you could have 1 deck with someone digitizing the disks into a shared storage sytem like the PDJ-A640, In other words each edit room would not need a deck.

exactly. You would have one deck as a central digitizing machine. Speed is up 3x real time. Or you could edit off of proxies and then online. Proxy ingest is fast.

After your clarification John, I think this is a question best suited for a systems integrator that does large installs for TV stations and the like. We're mostly shooters here. There's also a fair amount of IT involved.

There's people that do this already, or variations thereof (large scale reality TV shows done on XDCAM here in Los Angeles), but I doubt very much if you even found the right person they'd freely give away the information.

One integrator that I know of is The Whitlock Group in Richmond, VA. I know they do large scale installs and their expertise goes beyond just the video aspects of a project...but I've never used them.

On second though, Sony is probably your best bet. Their reps have heard it all, and if they don't know how to do it, they'll know somebody who does.

Ok one more question for the day, How well does XD HD cam integrate with Avid Adrenaline. What new software would you need, what problems if any have people had with using XD HD cam footage and getting it edited with Avid. What other upgrades to Post Production would you encounter. Right now we downconvert HDV to DV, edit in DV, and deliver on Beta SP. I know extensive generation loss.

One more tidbit. The PDW-F70 deck with the network card option connected to a gigabit hub may allow multiple systems to work with the deck at different times / even connect thru the web. One thing for sure is the gigabit speed network card option is faster than the standard firewire 400 link!