Re: P2 Archival Solution - Quantum SDLT600A

No. i contacted Quantum with the same question and they explained it like this: video files are typically already partially compressed (except for Uncompressed codecs), so you would never get 600GB capacity because the 600A's internal hardware compression wouldnt be able to compress the file much more than Quicktime has already. the 2:1 compression that tape drives typically employ is based on storing pure data files like Word and Excel Docs or things like that. since compression is part of most video codecs, the internal compression in the 600A would just slow things way down and not necessarily help with file sizes. i leave it off, which is what Quantum recommends for video.

since the deck and tape are OS agnostic, it acts in a weird way with files that have no extension. like .mov Quicktime files that have "hide extension" checked in the Get Info field. any video file that Final Cut captures from a video tape is this way. if you move a quicktime file with no extension to SDLT, then move it back to you local hard drive, Mac OS wont recognize the file as a video file and Final Cut wont reconnect to it. if you "un-hide" the extension before you move it to SDLT, then move it to SDLT and move it back, Final Cut wont reconnect to it because the file didnt have an extension in the edit, so to Final Cut its a different file. i have no experience with Windows with this deck, but i imagine it would be similar.

my point with the last story: our solution to storing quicktime files without extensions is to put them into a new folder and zip it. this folder is typically our Media Manager folder with all Media from the project. this conserves all the video files' properties and it also compresses the files better than the 600A's internal compressor. DV files compress quite a bit (4:1 or better) and DVCPRO HD is about 1.5:1. most graphics files wont compress at all. it is an additional time consuming step depending on how much you need to zip and how fast your computer is, but it also protects the integrity of the data and saves space. with MXF files from P2, you dont need to take this step, and you shouldnt since the 600A can read MXF metadata. depending on your workflow, this whole file extension thing may be a non-issue.

so for our 70min feature film, the Media Manager folder was a 90GB compressed zip file (probably 200GB+ uncompressed). if i needed one small file from that zip, i would move the zip off the deck (takes about an hour or so), then open the zip directory (not the whole file) with Zipeg. then i select the one file i need and Zipeg extracts that one file instead of unarchiving the entire zip file. typically we try to keep our zip files under 30GB so we dont have to constantly move huge zips for one small file. it sounds complicated, but we havent had a problem thus far. even if Quantum made a fix for this, i probably would still zip files because it saves so much space over hardware compression.

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