ARTICLES

The Tapeless World

As of this writing, there are some 400 HD formats in use around the world. And you thought you had a lot of choices! Formats have proliferated so fast, that there is now a complete disconnect between how we shoot and how we deliver.

The tapeless revolution has given the camera manufacturers an opportunity to save money by eliminating the tape drive mechanism and the shooters a new opportunity to shoot with any of several formats in a smaller, lighter camera.

Tapeless records to one of 6 devices and formats: PCMCIA cards, Flash memory cards, Blu-ray disks, Hard disks, SxS cards, SD cards. But, because the format we shoot to is almost never the format we output for distribution, the postproduction and editing process needs to include time for transcoding or converting from one format to another.

There are four times transcoding can take place: capture, editing, output, after output.

Moving to a larger question that looms in the tapeless world "where do I archive my original material, finished program and project files?" Most of us would say hard drives. They're cheap, easy to store and plug and play. But hard drives are NOT long term storage devices. If you don't spin-up a hard drive at lease once every three months, it may not spin-up at all - ever again. That is due to physical problems with the lubricants inside the drive. But the real bad news is that if you don't remove and replace the data on the drive at least once every 6 months, it may just "fade-out." That's right, it can just become so weak the computer can no longer recognize it as data. It needs to be moved off the drive, and then replaced on the drive. SuperDuper is a great application for this purpose
www.shirt-pocket.com/SuperDuper/SuperDuperDescription.html
In this clone and re-clone process the data is re-generated and restored back to its original strength.

Along with hard drives, there are several other longer term archiving solutions: Optical media including Blu-ray disks with uncompressed .mov data files, DLT and LTO tape, and a new product that is billed as a RAID of RAIDS (very, very expensive). As a matter of interest, here are the relative times that archival materials should last: replicated DVD-100 years (Impractical & very expensive), tape (DLT & LTO) and burned disks-25 years, and hard drives could be as short as 3 months. More realistically, if they are kept powered off and on the shelf, you could reasonably expect data loss in less than three years.

In summary, part of the PRE-Production process must include decisions about the final distribution format because that will affect the format used for shooting, you'll need to allow time for transcoding if you shoot and distribute in different formats, and special care needs to be given to archiving.

Speed, Speed, Speed

When you're editing do you ever wonder why some effects need to be rendered, and some don't. It's a function of several factors: hard drive speed, the hard drive connection, the type of video, the number of streams of video to be rendered and the speed of your processor. Whether your effects play without rendering, or need rendering while you’re working, all effects will need to be rendered prior to output, so allow some extra time.

The following tables were carefully and laboriously prepared by Larry Jordan (larryjordan.biz), to whom the entire production and postproduction communities need to give continual thanks.

It’s important to note here that most editing is done by having the source material on some type of hard drive. For better efficiency, it is recommended that you not let drives get more than 80% full. All hard disks require about a 20% overhead for the non-data communications between the drive and the computer. So, when comparing numbers on a drive, reduce the effective throughput by about 20% to get an idea of the effective data rate. Also remember that the fuller a hard disk gets, the slower it goes.

This first chart covers connection speeds of various types of connections (protocols). This will be important is determining the speed needed for various types of video. Remember, all speeds are ranges - individual devices can vary from the range.