Archiving?
 

On another post, David Newman asked why someone would want to archive back to tape. I have always understoon that tape is the best archiving media... I also am having trouble recording an m2t file back to tape, with Aspect 4 and P/Pro 1.5. Good video, but audio dropouts. The m2t file plays and sounds fine thru the VLC Player... So then what are the alternative archiving solutions? I would like, once that the project is off my system, to be able to make aditional SD DVD's and m2t Data DVD's, without having to reload media and EDL to accomplish this task.
Thanks,
Gary

Re:Archiving
 

Waiting for comments or info. Thanks

Not up to me. I don't archive in M2T, I don't archive to tape, I archive is CFHD AVI on Hard drive (which will last on the shelf much longer than tape and it is in the long run cheaper too.) Consider -- $100 will get you 300GB drive -- $4 will get you 13GB DV tape. The Gigs per dollar are about the same (HD 3GB per $1 and DV 3.25GB per $1). Yet the hard drive includes the heads, whereas you DV tape does not, so you have to factor in the head replacements on your DV/HDV deck/camera. Hard drive wins on price. And it also wins on speed 30MB/s vs 3MB/s, and on shelf storage -- one 3.5" drive is smaller than 23 DV tapes. The hard drive can be placed in a fault tolerant RAID, for increased data security.

There is no good reason today for DV tape archiving.

The way I do it is to capture in HDVSplit and archive the original split M2T files on DVD-R, dual layer if it's a lot of files.

I then batch convert them to Cineform using ConnectHD. It seems to work well.

Another hard disk archiver here - external USB 2.0 320GB drives are becoming ludicrously cheap. I also love the supreme levels of flexibility - I can review 720p/60 CineForm AVIs straight from the disk over the USB cable, which has proved to be very useful as we're currently in the process of redeveloping our website and I'm taking stills from our captures.

HDLink can do this in one step. It does capture, scene detection, and generates both the m2t files and avi files, all in one pass.

Best,
Christopher

Not quite. It produces one long m2t file vs HDVSplits many scene split m2t files. This is important because if convert that one long m2t file, it won't split it into scenes like it did when you captured directly from tape.

Not for me it doesn't. HDLink splits both the m2t and avi files.

Best,
Christopher

Sorry, I thought you were talking about HDConnect (which doesn't split an already captured m2t). Does HDLink do this?

I am using P/Pro 1.5 with an earlier version of Aspect and have not noticed audio dropouts yet.

The reason I go back to tape is to use the camera to play back edited video in high def. on other peoples TV's. I will also have an additional backup if I have a hard drive crash since I am using a 4 drive Raid 0

Yes, HDLink can capture, scene split, convert, and create m2t files and avi files in a single pass.

Best,
Christopher

What I'm looking for is for HDLink to be able to scene split Cineform avis from an archived m2t file.

David, you have really thrown me a curve ball. I was already to buy the new Sony deck. But, at the price it costs, could I be better to archive on hard drives? Darn, if I just had a money tree.

Dave

Laurence,

HDLink will easily split up a M2T into individual Cineform AVIs. It just won't split up the M2T into smaller M2T files.

I want it to capture scene detected M2T files like HSVSplit. Then convert the ones we want to convert.

David, it's obvious that you archive in CFHD avi, but for people outside CF, the situation is less clear. I mean, if all the material shot is archived in CFHD avi, then one's all business becomes also CF dependent.

In my case, I make wildlife shooting (mainly with XL H1), and the HD material needs to be useful for years, or say, for a decade or two. So, if I archive CFHD files, then I also wanted to know the codec will be there in the future.

Just recently, my system disk had some sort of problem, and consequently, in the end of the day I had to format the disc and install WinXP all programs -including Cineform stuff- from scratch. While installing the machine, I discovered, the system ID had changed and I was not able to install CF software with the existing activation key. (I sent a ticket to CF support, and the issue was nicely resolved. Thanks for that.) This incidence made me to realize how dependent I'll become on CF support, if everything is archived in CFHD avi (which technically still is, also in my view, the best option).

So, could you seriously think of this archiving issue? Eventually, from the user's point of view, it's not tempting to become fully dependent on the support, when something unexpectedly gets wrong. (Especially so, if one is in hurry, and things fail during the weekend, when nobody is there in the support.) Besides, in computer and software business everything seems to be in a rapid and constant change. In the worst case, the people behind the development team change and the new people have quite different goals.

Lauri,

This is not an issue. The decoder is not protected with security, as a result it can be run on different PC in the future. So even if the system ID changes the you can always install the decoders, giving you access to the old footage. We archive you can place the decoders with your archive; the key files are cfhd.dll & cfhd.inf (VFW) and CFDecode2.ax (DirectShow.) Or put a copy of the Aspect HD or Connect HD installer with the archive. We are going to make available a Decoders only installer that was make this even simpler.

"The Gigs per dollar are about the same (HD 3GB per $1 and DV 3.25GB per $1)."

Of course .m2t stores in about 1/4 to 1/3 the space, right? So that would mean to get one hour of storage in .avi you would need about 60 or so gigs on the hard drive, and that would mean your $100 300gig drive costs about $20.00 per hours of storage. Still cheap enough for a quality storage medium.

Really at issue here is what level of quality you want to store at. Certainly the less compressed version .avi's are more suitable for professional level preservation, but people forget that on this forum, there are a lot of hobbiest and advanced ameteurs that still have to be somewhat cost concious.

I am also guessing that HD's have about the same shelf life issues as a digital tape. Bearings can dry out, and HDs in storage are probable much mor likely to get moved around, bumped, or otherwise be mishandled. Eventually a disk surface will corrode due to elements just like tape.

Another potential of course, is a hybrid, storage to regular tape backup drives.

So is there any study on the reliability of the two storage mediums ?

I've had several external drives fail on me over the last few months, I wouldn't comfortable with archiving on a drive. I would back up to tape and also DVD and vaccuum seal the DVD with one of those food sealers, since oxygen is the enemy of optical discs. I can only hope one of them will stand the test of time.

David,

Thank you very much for the information. Since the new CF offer for Prospect HD is tempting, the next question is, does this same apply to Prospect HD? That is, is it possible to install the Prospect HD decoder on any PC? Second, will other editing systems besides PPro recognize the decoder?

Lauri,

Yes our 10-bit decoder can be installed on other machines. All applications that support AVI formats should see and be able to use our decoder. Those that are 8-bits will interpret our footage as 8-bits instead of 10-bits. We haven't done extensive testing ourselves, but collectively our users have lots of experience using CineForm Intermediate files with different AVI-compatible apps.

And as you may be aware, we will be wrapping CineForm Intermediate in QuickTime within a couple-ish months (it's working internally now). The QT version will become available on both Mac and PC. We will also offer conversion utilities to change the wrapper format between AVI and QT. The conversion utility will be very fast because it will simply rewrap the compressed file with the appropriate header. QT support will further expand compatibility, but this time onto MacOS.

Quicktime and Cineform.

Does this mean the eventual possibility of exporting finished HDV projects to H264 in future?

We don't directly touch any distribution formats ourselves, even in Premiere. But if an application is AVI (or in the future QT) compatible then it will be able to read our files. If that same app can export to h.264 (or other formats) then the conversion from CineForm Intermediate to anything else can be achieved. I haven't specifically followed plug-ins for h.264 lately, but as soon as they're available in Premiere, AE, Vegas, FCP (later for us), then conversion to h.264 won't be a problem.

David,

One more question: I store the XL H1 image directly to hard disk (Citidisk HDV). Then I use HDLink to convert the m2t files to CF AVI. Do I make a silly mistake somewhere, for I'm not able to select the source file and converted file folders independently of each other?

I would like to read the source clips from the Citidisk HDV (having firewire connection) and store the converted files directly on the RAID array. Currently, I need first to copy the m2t files to the RAID array, and only then convert to CF avi using HDLink. The copy stage is pretty slow and is kind of waste of time. Moreover, if everything is archieved in CFHD files, the copy stage is dummy.

Lauri,

In the preferences panel of HDLink, under Capture Location, set the location and check the box marked "Use Capture Location for converted files."

David, thank you, this partly solved the problem. The remaining issue is to rename the footages to be converted to CFHD-avi. CitiDISK names the m2t-files automatically (CLIP00001, CLIP0002, and so on), and HD-link adds string "-001" to the end of each file name. For archiving one needed a same kind of thing which is in the Batch command of Adobe Photoshop; It enables one to specify the output file name as a combination "name" + "extension" + "automatically increasing serial number" (one is able to specify the number of digits and the starting index of increasing serial number).