Time to hoard mini-DV tapes?
 

. . . or go tapeless?

After a marathon deposition depleted my supply of Panasonic PQ series tapes, I stopped by a retail store here in Atlanta to pick up some tapes in case I needed them before my order from B&H comes in. (I'm too cheap to spring for overnight shipping.) They were completely out of Panasonic tapes and several other brands. The clerk told me that the earthquake and/or tsunami damaged some of the plants involved in the manufacture of tapes and that mini-DV tapes will be in short supply.

Any truth to this? Or am I simply repeating rumors and contributing to a panic-buying mentality?

Ironically, the store still had Sony tapes, which I understand is the company most directly affected by this tragedy.

Re: Time to hoard mini-DV tapes?
 

Check Amazon. My Sony tapes say hecho en Mexico.

Re: Time to hoard mini-DV tapes?
 

Hi Tom... yes its true.... Many plants sustained damages in the Japan disaster, but Sony's was hit the hardest (where magnetic media is manufactured) ...

I put in an order last week from my supplier and got the last of the DVCAM tapes they had...

Re: Time to hoard mini-DV tapes?
 

And the situation won't be much better for Flash memory cards - the factories have been impacted. Even where the factories themselves are undamaged, the rolling blackouts and aftershocks are preventing them from re-opening - to say nothing of how their employees (at least their SURVIVING employees) will get to work, as gasoline etc are also in short supply.

The fuel issue is so bad that mortuaries have run out of kerosene to cremate the victims so they're being burred in mass graves temporarily.

Highways are closed to normal traffic so they can prioritize relief efforts. My clients have a factory about 60 miles from the hardest hit area and they are limited to one truck a day - period. So where before we'd bring stuff into our distribution centers by the pallet based on our production plan, we're now only moving stuff for which we have firm orders in hand.

Re: Time to hoard mini-DV tapes?
 

It's becoming a problem on network shows.

TVB | Supplies of Sony Videotape Are Running Low

Re: Time to hoard mini-DV tapes?
 

Sorry for hijack, but did you notice this <Broadcast Tower Repairman’s Free Climb Captured on Video> in the 'Most Popular Stories' sidebar in the link above? Aaargh!

Back on topic: I was finding the now discontinued JVC tapes hard enough to source as it was, but suddenly it's getting harder to find stocks of other brands due to the Sony situation I would think.

Re: Time to hoard mini-DV tapes?
 

re JVC tape (unrelated to the earthquake)

As I understand it from my friends in the tape business in Japan, JVC spun all their tape and media operations off into a company known as Victor Advanced Media (JVC is Japan Victor Corporation as in RCA Victor) which was then bought by Taiyo Yuden. So it isn't immediately clear to me at this point what is called what or made or sold by whom - I had understood that the tape would still be marketed as JVC under the JVC name, but that's where I run out of information.

Re: Time to hoard mini-DV tapes?
 

That's interesting, Jim. Most suppliers here are just listing JVC tapes as "out of stock, now discontinued" or words to that effect.

Re: Time to hoard mini-DV tapes?
 

UPDATE 1-Taiyo Yuden to acquire JVC's recording media unit | Reuters

This link points to an article that's a couple of years old. I don't really have much more info. I'm in the LTO drive business, not the media end of things so I haven't tracked this story lately.

Re: Time to hoard mini-DV tapes?
 

Thanks, Jim.

I found the Taiyo Yuden product catalogue Catalog Download?TAIYO YUDEN Co.,Ltd. and it has optical recording media but no magnetic tape.

So it looks like RIP to the JVC miniDVD. (There's a rap in their somewhere!)

Re: Time to hoard mini-DV tapes?
 

I looked on Maxell's website and it seems the Red Maxell minidv tapes I use are gone. I have to switch tapes and not at a good time. I need to pick up at least 200 tapes somewhere for this year.

I just bough 150 Sony tapes, now to clean the ole' heads before I switch. I used to get my red Maxell's from Samsclub.com but they quit carrying them, and I think Maxell quit making them. Hmm, I''ll be forced to hard disk recording next year no doubt.

Re: Time to hoard mini-DV tapes?
 

I just bought a couple of hundred Sony DV tapes from Amazon. There seems to be plenty of stock there and on ebay.

Can they be reused if stocks really run low?

Re: Time to hoard mini-DV tapes?
 

Lots of JVC tapes are still for sale on Amazon.

Re: Time to hoard mini-DV tapes?
 

Not that I can find on the UK site. There are lots of promises, but when you actually go in to this in detail, many of the hits are for other products. Have a look at this typical result below - there's only one single 3 pack available here. Some websites are still listing JVC tapes but when you try to order them, they don't actually have them. Are you saying you have actually managed to get JVC tapes from Amazon in the last couple of weeks?

Re: Time to hoard mini-DV tapes?
 

Re re-use.

Lots of people don't want to re-use tape because of dropout concerns, but I don't see any reason you couldn't re-use them. Seems to be a personal decision re using them over again or not. As I said, I work in LTO development/marketing and we re-use the tapes as many as twenty thousand times each in our drive test line even though they're "only" rated for five thousand cycles. Of course, LTO and DV are radically different so it's not fair to make a direct comparison.

I sort of wish I had a camera that would record directly to LTO;<)

Considering that we're now working on getting 3 - 4 TB per cartridge I could leave one cartridge in the camera for a couple of years. By which time we'd be getting 7 - 10 TB per cartridge.

Re: Time to hoard mini-DV tapes?
 

No, I bought Sony Mini Dv's.

But JVC tapes seem to be available.



At least I was able to put the above items in my shopping basket (but didn't want to buy them). More options on the US site, which will deliver to the UK.

Re: Time to hoard mini-DV tapes?
 

Still finding out about the first link, but here's what happened when I tried to order more than one pack on the second link (this is what I've been finding is happening most of the time - also the delivery is more than the cost of the tapes - this is also a common problem).

EDIT: Checked out the first link - there are currently 7 packs (the most I've seen so far). Don't know about the delivery though - it is often per pack I have found.

Believe me, JVC tapes are getting hard to find - I've spent some time on this recently and have cleared out all the stock in 3 UK suppliers.

Re: Time to hoard mini-DV tapes?
 

I just placed an order with B&H for 100 Panasonic tapes ( they are limiting amounts you can order at a time) and noticed they have the Maxell red label dv tapes in stock... I added qty 100 to my cart with no issues (but removed them ) So if you want them this seems like a good supply source ( for now.. )

Re: Time to hoard mini-DV tapes?
 

The Panasonic PQ series tapes I ordered from B&H last week came in on schedule and with no backorders.

Thanks for all the input! I knew I'd get the inside scoop on this forum.

I had no idea Flash media would be impacted so much. Isn't a large percentage made in Korea?

Re: Time to hoard mini-DV tapes?
 

Chipmaker Micron focuses on Japan wafer suppliers | Reuters

http://news.cnet.com/8301-13924_3-20042212-64.html

It's a tough situation. Even if the memory makers are elsewhere, a lot of the raw wafers come from Japan. And for the offshore makers to ramp up they would need new fab process equipment, a lot of which comes from Japan. So it bites at several levels.

We have a plastic supplier in the immediate area - in fact in one of the towns that suffered major damage, but the factory is on high ground. Biggest issue now is rolling power outages and shortage of trucks and gasoline.

Plastic is one thing - you can work around power outages - but semiconductor fab needs continuous power - you can't just stop and start.

Re: Time to hoard mini-DV tapes?
 

So is it still wise to invest in an HD camera that uses mini DV?
I have an HMC40 that is great and a T3i. I have been looking for a 2nd traditional video camera and have seen XH-A1s and V1Us going pretty cheap. Just wondering if its worth picking one up or if tape will soon be extinct.

Re: Time to hoard mini-DV tapes?
 

I had struggled with that same question. I posed it to both some buddies of mine and customer service at B&H. My buddy said he's not worried. In his mind you can still buy VHF tapes and Hi 8 tapes and both are formats older then Mini DV he said he could see them being harder to find, but not just going away. B&H's view on it was that it's a very common format and they do not see it going away in the next 10 years.

Re: Time to hoard mini-DV tapes?
 

Thanks for the reply Paul. I still have a Panny DVC60 that I haven't been able to part with. I started getting worried when I couldn't buy the Sony tapes I like at Costco. They had a real good Price. Wal-Mart is still carrying them although not as cheap.
There just seems to be some smoking deals on used HD cams that use tape.

Re: Time to hoard mini-DV tapes?
 

A little different from the DV market, but in the commercial tape backup space, we see media sales actually peak around 14 years AFTER the tape drive has been withdrawn from marketing. Generally speaking, it seems that as you approach the ten year after withdrawal mark, customers start stocking up on media. Media availability tapers off after 15 to 20 years as I recall.

I would expect DV to follow the same trajectory but somewhat accelerated as the drives themselves are far less robust than enterprise computer drives so wear out is sooner which would depress the demand curve. And workflow advantages to solid state will also accelerate the demand fall off.

I think the B&H guesstimate is pretty close - I don't see any reason to really worry about media availability for quire a few years - price may increase, but it will still be around. Heck, I can still buy film for my 5 X 7 view camera and my 1930's era Zeiss folding camera. I think if you buy a tape based camera now, it will wear out long before the supply of media dries up. I have no plan to replace my JVC 110 any time soon.

One of my clients made an absolute killing manufacturing 8 inch floppy drives - they were the last maker and it became a very profitable business indeed. It seems that outfits that really make money in the computer biz are the first to enter the market - and the last to exit.

Re: Time to hoard mini-DV tapes?
 

To anybody who cannot get tapes but has a stock of old tapes where the footage on them is no longer required as an archive:

Re-use is no problem whatsoever. If the existing footage is still intact and plays without dropouts, recording over it will be just as good. Dropouts occur when the tape is mechanically drawn through the mechanism and over the heads. It makes no difference whether you are recording or playing back. There is no wear-out mechanism in the magnetic domains.
Indeed, some professional organisations actively seek used 'cleaned' tapes (including DV) as they are 'known good'. The DV system was designed in the early '90s when the problems of tape were well understood, (i.e. 20 years after the introduction of Betamax and VHS), and the tapes are designed for hundreds of head passes. Consumer Mini DV tapes have ISTR 29 components each (Tom Hardwick has counted them personally), all for a manufacturing cost of a few tens of cents. So a new tape is more likely to have a defect than one which has already been successfully used.

I have several hundred DV tapes where I can check their content and re-use if necessary for HDV. I actually bought one Sony 'chipped' tape for my TRV900E. It has been used many times over the last 13 years as a hack test tape and I have never had a dropout on it.


Steve

Re: Time to hoard mini-DV tapes?
 

There seem to be two "religions" about tape - the "Use Once" and the "Use Often" religions.

But I know that no tape maker designs their product to be used only once. Although of course they make more money if nobody re-uses it.

This is one of the major differences between tape and toilet paper.

By the way, there is firm evidence that a tape drive that is exposed to only new media will wear faster than one that is exposed to a mix of used and new media. The slitting process leaves exposed grains of magnetic material and, when viewed at ultra high magnifications, the edges of new tape look remarkably like hacksaws. Very highly abrasive to tape guides etc. A few passes through a tape drive will burnish the edges.

Tape edge abrasivity varies among manufacturers depending on their tape composition and slitting processes.

Re: Time to hoard mini-DV tapes?
 

Hahaha - nearly spayed a mouthful of a rather fine Chilean red over my Macbook pro there Jim.

OT: Just to be bad - has anyone else still using tape noticed a certain schadenfreude over reports of unreliable cards, buffer overruns and other card woes? Makes up for some of the more smug comments from those who have left tape behind. (I've been recording tapelessly on some jobs for 4 years now BTW).

Re: Time to hoard mini-DV tapes?
 

I'm using both tape (HDV) and cards (550D). I've never had a tape dropout on record and only one instance of a playback glitch (which disappeared the next time that I played the clip). Nor have I had any loss of card files.
So far, all my tapes are kept with the original takes as archive and they seem to play just as new from over 12 years ago.
I take care to back-up card files on a NAS before I re-use the chips, but I've yet to have the results of a shoot disappear, nor a HDD failure. Critical files are backed up again on another HDD.
The rush to ditch tapes by some is more of a lifestyle decision than one based on engineering logic, and I'm sure that some will regret it one day. Unless the footage is being shot for instant use and distribution, e.g. news footage, the real-time ingestion of tapes is hardly a major issue.

Steve

Re: Time to hoard mini-DV tapes?
 

Hi Steve

I understand the image problems that tape faces these days - I'm in the LTO tape business and most people are surprised when I tell them that tape is still around - most people seem to assume that you can only find a tape drive in a museum or something.Well, the industry is still shipping around a half million LTO drives a year, so SOMEBODY must still be using it!

I think you have a trade-off here - HDV has higher capture time, but it's a reasonably archive friendly medium. Memory cards don't have the up front capture issue, but they're much too expensive to just toss on the shelf so sooner or later you need to invest some time and energy in transferring the contents to a more archive-friendly medium. In the end, I'm not sure that the trade-off between the ingest time of tape and the archiving and archive management issues of solid state is all that favorable to tapeless.

Unless of course you just copy the card to a HDD and leave it on the shelf hoping that you won't be a victim of "bit rot" or mechanical failure induced by just storing the disk. Which after all is designed to spin, not to moulder away on a shelf in someone's closet.

Re: Time to hoard mini-DV tapes?
 

You are right Jim.
Tape definitely does have an image problem in some areas.
It's considered dead in the consumer market because the marketeers have been leading the lay buyers along the path that generates new product sales.
It's regarded by some in the prosumer and low-end professional market as inferior, partly because of the overlap in consumer-targeted marketing, and partly because many of them see the ENG market moving to file-based capture. What I can't see is why those who don't have the ENG world's overbearing need for speed, tying themselves into a burdensome backup regime, (or worse, just taking the risk with their assets), just to save a few minutes ingest time per hour of footage.
As I said above, in a true professional environment, where a high level of asset reliability is required, tape is still considered a viable and cost-effective storage medium. Gone are the analogue tape issues of print through, noise modulation and mechanical tape stretching; digital tape systems have designed-in tolerance of the physical medium's shortfall.
Tape will survive for a few years more, although techno-fashion will probably relegate it to products outside the volume sales arena.

Steve

Re: Time to hoard mini-DV tapes?
 

A year or so ago I read a good article about the Harvard University library's digitization and archiving program. They keep three copies of the digital archive in three separate centers. and they continually scan all the files in the background checking for errors - which they find frequently! They correct the errors by looking at the other two copies of the file. The key here is that if the data weren't online, they wouldn't notice an error until possibly too late. Just writing data to disk and storing it on a shelf, in my humble opinion, is a recipe for disaster. It isn't a matter of WHETHER the data will become corrupted, just a matter of WHEN. And if you don't know it's gone, there isn't much you can do to fix it.

This stuff requires a lot of planning and effort.

Re: Time to hoard mini-DV tapes?
 

I was speaking to another camera guy the other week and he was coming across producers who thought tapeless meant that they didn't need to spend money on tape. They were rather shocked about having to buy hard drives to store material, the cost of which would probably be more than the cost of the HDV tapes.

Re: Time to hoard mini-DV tapes?
 

Thanks Brian! Great story.

Of course tapeless doesn't mean free! You have to buy the memory cards and THEN pay for HDD to keep the stuff on so you can re-use the cards. And SOMEBODY or SOMETHING has to expend the time and effort ($$$) to manage the archive process. About the only gain is capture/ingest time (which can be a big deal - after all aren't we all impatient to get the footage up in our NLE???)

Re: Time to hoard mini-DV tapes?
 

Doesn't mean free but does mean cheaper. First, mini-DV tapes as a storage medium is more expensive per GB than common harddisk drives.

You save time, and that can be worth a lot too: Not only is it faster to transfer data it is also possible to select only part of the data you actually want to keep. So you become more productive.

And, so you thought that using mini-DV as archive is safe and doesn't need any maintenance? Think again. You need to manage your archive on mini-DV as well, verify data integrity, tapes deteriorate too.

BR, Erik

Re: Time to hoard mini-DV tapes?
 

Well, everything deteriorates with time - including us.

The comment about "free" was a direct reaction to Brian's post about producers who did indeed seem to believe that tapeless equated to free.

Re: Time to hoard mini-DV tapes?
 

Storage costs can also depend on the number of hard drive copies you keep and cost of the hard drives which you consider to be of acceptable quality.

Download time can be an issue if you're just the DP and you're working 12-14 hour days, then tape makes life a lot easier.

Cost savings come on cameras because you no longer need expensive VTRs to record the data.