JamieG Analysis

This week on “The Digital Production Buzz“, they had Rob Willox of Sony Professional product line (VTRs Hi-end Digital Cameras).  This was an interesting interview as it shows how Sony are reacting to the trend towards Tapeless Workflow.  This includes the development of solid state express card cameras and optical recording done by the EX-cam range.

Rob acknowledged the departure of Sony from production storage technologies.  For example, Sony has not tried to compete with Computer industry storage technology like the express card.  To tell the truth, its simply not worth it for them trying to compete with the low margins the computer industry work on.

This is a big departure from Sony’s history of driving sales by introducing different tape formats every 2-5 years to encourage user to re-purchase equipment.  This has worked well for them over the years with a variety of betacam formats. (SP, Digital, SX, HD, HD-SR)  As a facility owners, it has been the bane of my life. (See a previous post in which I traveled to NAB to have a big talk to the VTR engineers on how they should build a them.)

Tape for acquisition does have some small advantages but at the end of the day.  All independent film makers that come to me for advise.  The first comment they says is. “I want a tapeless workflow”. They see tape spooling and ingestion as a complete wast of time/money.  Recorded to a data file as filmed is exactly what has to happen as some stage so the non-linear editing system can use it.  As they are usually shooting on the cheap, media security and reliability is not seen to be as important.

In general, however, I see solid state recorders that attach the the side of a camera and have uncompressed HDSDI/HDMI interfaces as the imminent future of Production.

Then once finished, creation of digital files distributed over the internet for display in Cinema or cable and TV networks around the world.

One problem still exists and appears to be overlooked. Long term archival of source material.

We have two solutions.  Optical Storage or good old TAPE.

Firstly, Archival on Hard Drives is not recommended but very common.  Drives do not last well if left on a shelf  for long periods without spin up.  And when they fail, you loose it all.

The latest Sony HDCAM SR upgrade, tho expensive, looks like one of the better solutions.  Its a proven long term storage media that can store enormous amounts of data on a tape which can also be spooled and viewed without needing to pull the data of the tape. (This includes viewing common image sequences in file formats such as DPX, TIF as a data backup on the tape.)

I really hope they bring this type of technology to lower cost but obviously slower to transfer tape drives.

OR

Optical storage such as Blu-Ray.  The first issue here is that Blu-Ray has had little written about its longevity.  Still, this issue alone will give Blu-Ray the success and longevity may have expressed will die out as Internet Distribution will greatly reduce the Movie on Optical disk market.  In my opinion, Blu-Ray is only a stop gap.  We will need faster and more capacity optical media with archival ratings.  This may be a revision of Blu-Ray or a completely new technology.  We still have the need and it will grow for the video producer as we use higher resolutions and less compression (4k images, more colour depth)

[Update, This Week In Media ep 85  featured my Blog post.  Based on Alex’s comments here is a follow up post.
Alex Lindsay, Ok, we get it. You don’t use tapes.