Survey - how many of us still shooting on tape?

[Jim Andrada]

Staff??? Here, kitty!!!

[Marcus Martell]

Even here for many reasons using still the old Sony FX1 for sport etc.....

For documentaries using DSLRs

[Joachim Hoge]

I haven't shot on tape since 2008 or 9.
That goes for both my own projects and when I'm hired to do broadcast work.
I even advocated using the xdcam SD disks on norways biggest reality show "The Farm" back in 2004. They agreed and we were the first big production going tape less.

In 2010 we shot a TV series on Sony EX cameras, and 5D cameras. NRK (BBC equivalent here in Norway) wanted us to deliver on SR tapes, but we managed to convince them to be the first production to deliver the entire show on hard drives.

So unless its LTO tape has been dead to me for a long time. Good riddance

As for back up and archive, DV Tape we realised are absolutely crap. We just finished an extreme sport tv series and had a lot of archive footage we shot on canon XL-1 etc that we needed to digitise again.
A lot of the tapes could only be played back on XL-1 camera, so we had to track one down. Not so easy.
A lot of the tapes showed pixel damage, some to 3 differ players to be find one that could play them. A few we couldn't play back at all. They all been stored safely inside a dark cool basement.

Make sure you keep the camera you shot your footage on if it's HDV or DV.

[Noa Put]

I also heared the same about the 25p format of the xh-a1 that is supposedly was only possible to playback or transfer footage on canon camera's yet I didn't have any issues using a sony fx1000 for that reason. I also suspect a recorder like the panasonic dv10000 shouldn't have any issues reading that canon tape.

Also as backup I have transferred 18 year old tapes a few years back from my daughters birth without any issues, so my experience is they have been very reliable for long term backup, if you store them right.

[Joachim Hoge]

I have 10 year old tapes of my daughter that I transferred without problems as well, but white this project where we had tapes from a periods of 5 years, we really had a lot of tapes and a lot more problem tapes than we anticipated.
My point is that I've had a lot less problems with footage on hard drives than on tape, and we have plenty of Terabytes.

[Noa Put]

I just have the opposite experience with harddrives as well :) Had several clients the past years that came back to me because their portable harddrive which they brought with them to copy their wedding in HD onto had crashed with no way to recover the data. I also have had 3 internal drives and 2 external drives fail on me the past 10 years, that might not seem much but it's 1/3 of the amount of harddrives I have owned so far so that's more then 30% harddrive faillure. My tapes otoh still allow me to get my raw data.

[Joachim Hoge]

I've been lucky on the hard drive front. Hardly any failure. Had failure on the connection ports, but then I just took the hard drive out and put it in a docking station. I find its quite rear that the actual drive fails. Usually it's the power or usb/fw ports that fails.
My other problem now is to keep an old Mac around with fc7 just to be able to capture tapes. I work in fcx now and you can't even capture from tape anymore.

It's easier to me to just transfer footage to a new drive every now and then when capacity improves.
For critical back up we use enterprise class drives and never had an issue with them

[Dave Barnes]

Noah - I was in the same boat with playing back my 24f tapes shot with my Canon xh-a1s , and I picked up a used Sony Hvr-m15au and it works fine, plays them with no issues... Note that this is the updated version of the hvr-m15u.

[Joachim Hoge]

But this is a hit and miss solution, we got burnt by it and not to mention the days spent sorting it out. Tracking down second hand cameras that may or may not work with your tapes, then the hours transferring tapes that might have some artefacts you didn't notice until you are in the edit.
Quite a bit quicker to look through some old hard drives
I think your best bet is to keep your camera around together with your tapes to make sure your tapes are playable.
I'm not saying this is happening a lot. I really don't know. All the tapes shot on my Sony cameras seems to mostly work fine. I only had one that didn't work.

[Donald McPherson]

I use to use this ScenalyzerLive Page when I capture from my FireWire card sorry Windows only. Now free.

[Paul R Johnson]

My tape based cameras can record to a drive, but despite the extra speed, I still find myself using the tapes. I really don't know why - they certainly suffer from problems, but on the cameras I haver that ONLY record to solid state, it doesn't worry me. I haven't got rid of the old cameras simply because they are now my only digital access to my old tape library. I still have a Betacam somewhere for the same reason, and a Sony Hi8 - which I bought ages ago - still sits in the store for the odd Hi8 archive job.

I even found the Sony launch when doing a clear out a few years ago - off topic but for those interested in how new formats were promoted back then - here's a link

sony hi-8 pro launch on Vimeo

[Dave Barnes]

Thought I would bump this up a couple years later...

I am actually still shooting some projects on HDV tape still.... Anyone else? :)

Have we all switched over to solid state media?

[Boyd Ostroff]

Have not shot anything on tape since 2011 (Sony HVR-Z1U) and I no longer own a tape-based camera. However I purchased a used Sony HVR-M15U DV/DVCAM/HDV deck a few months ago. Several hundred tapes that I shot of opera performances during the period 2001-2011 just came back home, and I've begun a project to capture them all to a 5TB drive to preserve them. Have also captured around 50 of my old personal tapes in both DV and HDV.

Since hard drives were small and expensive when I originally shot this footage, I kept very few files after editing a project, while many tapes were never captured at all. So far, my luck has been pretty good, only a handful of small sections of these tapes have been corrupt. But I sure would not want to go back to shooting on tape!

[Owen Dawe]

Yes I am. I still have three Canon XL H1s cameras in use. I'm currently looking into recording from sdi though. I don't really want to buy new cameras. I'm 75 now and consider new cameras a waste of money as they seem to devalue so darned quick. Worse than a new car.

[Brian Dollemore]

An amateur's viewpoint regarding the durability of tape:

Back in the summer I re-captured a set of ten Pana miniDV tapes that we shot during a visit to Canada in 2006. That was with my first camcorder, a lowly but competent Pana GS300. I still have the edited DVDs but somewhere along the line the initial .avi files had gone missing. Re-capture for the archives (all ten hours realtime) via my later GS500 was glitch-free, and a reminder of just how good even the simple hardware really was, ten years ago.

I use a Pana HD-TM700 nowadays (even that model dating back ten years!), being so much lighter to carry around but a project a while back used HD material together with some miniDV from the GS500 with fair success.