EX footage onto Blu-ray disc
 

If a single layer blu-ray disc can hold 25Gigs and EX can record 1 hour on 16mb cards then I should be able to archive about 15 hours on one Blu-ray disc?

Any thoughts on archiving EX footage to Blu-ray discs?
I'll likely use the highest quality picture, 1080p on the camera and want uncompressed files on the disc.

Will re-writable discs be risky business for adding to the disc along the way?

No, a little under 1 hour of EX recorded material in HQ mode will fit onto a 16Gb card, not a 16mb card. This is where your confusion lies. Hope this is of assistance to you.

OOOOPS!

I never was good at math!

So, close to 2 hours?

Thanks.

16GB card holds about 57 minutes when shooting HQ 35mbps. All HQ setting play at about the same data rate so 1080p or 720p makes no difference in size. None of this is "uncompressed."

Please don't confuse native codec or archiving without further compression with uncompressed.

It actually uses something like around 14.9GB give or take though.
I'm not exactly how big a 25GB Blu-ray disc is but it might be slightly smaller as 4.7GB DVD is actually about 4.3GB and an 8.5GB DL-DVD is actually about 7.95GB. A 25GB Blu-ray might be about 23GB or so.

You might get just over 1 1/2 hours on 25GB Blu-ray.

Interesting note about costs.
You can get 25GB Blu-ray disks for around $8
On the other hand Delkin archival disks are around $28
A 16GB Transcend Class 6 SDHC card you can use in MxR is also around $28
Sony 23GB XDCAM disk is about $20

Given how long it takes to burn the blu-ray disk or the cost of using archival media prices are getting awfully close to the point where one might consider shooting to the Transcend SDHC cards and keeping them as one would with tape.

I'm doing pretty good tonight with mis-statements. I did mean no further compression or transcoding, not 'uncompressed'.

Delkin archival discs are $28? What is the projected life of a standard Blu-ray at $8 vs the Delkin at $28?

Thanks

I spoke to someone from Delkin about this last year at a trade show. I believe they said a typical blu-ray disc might be about 50 years. Their discs are rated at 200 years and beyond. Their disc surfaces apparently can handle scratches and retain data retrieval. They also said they do not believe dual layer blu-ray can be archival so far in their testing, hence they don't make 50GB archival discs.

Blu-ray Archival Gold Recordable Media, The 200 Year Disc – Delkin Devices
Delkin Archival Gold Inkjet Media.The Most Reliable Media in the World.

They have white paper on their CD-R longevity (300 years) but I couldn't find any on blu-ray.

Of course some people argue over the validity of the testing compared to real world circumstance.

The other key is backward compatibility of future blu-ray data readers and whether something eventually replaces optical discs entirely. The longevity won't help if you can't find a data reader in 10 years.

Craig: Did they say why they don't think the 50's are archival-ready? And if that's the case, how are you splitting up your +25gb BPAV folders?

Don't forget you can put 20 min of footage onto a blueray encoded "DVD" using toast 10.
Not what you are talking about, but good to know for people without blueray...

You can buy printable blank disks for $4 each in bulk. Getting closer to $1 that I am hoping for. However, I can live with $3.99 each in bulk for now.

Where can you buy them for $4 each? You have to buy 10,000 of them to get that price? :)

Blu Ray DVD, Blu Ray Disc - Shop4Tech
per 100.

Or $3.75 here
Blank Blu-ray Discs, Blu-ray Media

A 25 GB Blu-ray disc should hold 25,000 Megabytes or 25,000,000,000 bytes. Craig is referring to older binary calculations of data capacity, which have been resolved by defining a gigabyte as 1,000,000,000 bytes and a "gibibyte" as 1,073,741,824 bytes. For more info on decimal versus binary calculations see Gigabyte - Wikipedia, the free encyclopedia.

Also note that the EX uses a variable data rate in HQ mode so exact capacity calculations are difficult. If we use Craig's figure of 57 minutes per 16 GB then a 25 GB disc should hold 57 / 15 * 25 = 89 minutes of HQ footage. Call it 85 minutes to allow some wiggle room and you should be able to get a good estimate of how many discs you need for a given amount of footage.

And a large selection from B&H from individual to bulk printable.

The cheapest being four 50 packs of Sony inkjet printable which works out to about $3.60 each.

CDs, DVDs & Blu-ray Discs | B&H Photo Video

Thanks for that Kevin.

The problem is there's a fair number of burning/authoring software using the older method.
Sony's old ClipBrowser was one example. Version one wold split the BPAV at "8GB" (for DL-DVD) but it wouldn't fit on the 8.5GB DL-DVD (as 8.5GB would be 7.95GB under the older method Kevin refers to). ClipBrowser2 doesn't have that issue though.

So one may not know which method your utility of choice is using. We can only hope as these things are updated they use 1,000,000,000 bytes for a GB as a uniform standard.

hard disks are still cheaper, and more important faster, and by the end of the year with SDXC
up to 2 terra i hope archiving problem will be solved

Yes, unfortunately you have to know whether your software is thinking in decimal figures or binary ones - and then translate the effective capacity accordingly. But the end result is the same either way: figure about 85-90 minutes of HQ footage on a single-layer Blu-ray disc.

Interesting point that hard drives are currently cheaper than Blu-ray discs per GB, but hard drives are unreliable as a permanent storage medium - and we don't know whether Blu-ray discs are reliable. Ideally you might make one backup on a hard drive and another on Blu-ray to have both redundant copies and alternative resistance to failure (depending on stress conditions).

Did they give a reason for this, Craig? And if so, how do you split up an over 25gb bpav folder (let's say from a 3-hour recording on a phu drive) for a data archive disk?

I have had to do this for a large project and yes it can be done. Refer to the XDCAM EX Clip Browser Manual for combining and splitting BPAV folders. There are in fact, settings in the Clip Browser to split for Blu-ray archival at 25GB (Disc 1) and 50GB (Disc 2), see page 30-31 of the manual (ver 1.2.5). Once they are split, it simply a matter of using your Blu-ray burning software to make a data disc (in my case, I use Toast 10 on the Mac). I've made both 25GB and 50GB data archival discs with BPAV folders. Cheers!

I can't recall the reason but it may have to do with laser focus over time.

I'm still using DL-DVD but considering the drop in prices of both media and burners and the possible faster burn speed, I'm considering moving to blu-ray.

ClipBrowser2 has a split function which ensures the data will fit (didn't work properly in ClipBrowser1).

Thanks, guys, I see it under "Splitting Folders". Looks pretty straightforward.

re-writable
 

Any issues with using a re-writable disc for archiving?

I'd like to continually add to the blu-ray disc as I accumulate more material rather than wait till I have 80 minutes of material before archiving.

I'm thinking of a system where I have a primary space on the computer HDD with an external HDD for initial backup plus the re-writable DVD for secondary back up. Then when the external HDD fills I can make a second non re-writable DVD for archiving. Longer term I'd have a re-writable and a non re-writable set of DVD's as backup of all pertinent files.

I'll also be doing some travel. I could leave the external HDD behind and make backups to re-writable DVD's. DVD's would seem to be a safer bet for the bumps and bruises of travelling.