P2 Archival Solution - Quantum SDLT600A
by TADD Productions
on
Jan 3, 2007 at 6:50:46 pm
I am in the process of testing a P2 archive solution with Quantum's SDLT600A tape drive and Imagine's HD Log logging software. Anyone out there got any experience with the SDLT600A? Also, does anyone have an idea what the potential demand might be for an MXF-aware video archive solution. Thanks.
Stuart Huggins - Multimedia Designer
:|: Technical Artistry &
Digital Design Productions, LLC
Re: P2 Archival Solution - Quantum SDLT600A by TADD Productions on Apr 26, 2007 at 12:51:14 pm
Jeremy,
I completed my test of this solution a few months ago. After careful consideration of this solution, I choose to return the demo unit to Quantum. Until the price drops significantly on this DLT drive, I will not be an owner. The DLT hardware met my expectations, however, the bundled software (including FTP server) was inadequate.
Stuart Huggins
Multimedia Designer
Technical Artistry &
Digital Design Productions, LLC
www.taddproductions.com
Re: P2 Archival Solution - Quantum SDLT600A by Arthur Aldrich on Jan 4, 2007 at 11:08:33 am
[TADD Productions]"I am in the process of testing a P2 archive solution with Quantum's SDLT600A tape drive and Imagine's HD Log logging software. Anyone out there got any experience with the SDLT600A? Also, does anyone have an idea what the potential demand might be for an MXF-aware video archive solution."
The demand will grow as P2 card capacities increase and more users adopt the P2 workflow.
If Apple decides to bless us with native MXF support, I believe the potential is much greater.
Re: P2 Archival Solution - Quantum SDLT600A by TADD Productions on Apr 26, 2007 at 12:56:13 pm
Arthur,
I completed my test of this solution a few months ago. After careful consideration of this drive's effectiveness, I choose to return the demo unit to Quantum. Until the price drops significantly on this DLT drive, I will not become an owner. The DLT hardware met my expectations, however, the bundled software (including FTP server) was inadequate.
With or without the SDLT600A, I am still very excited about the P2/FCP workflow. I have managed to squeeze additional time/cost savings from this combination and I look forward to further developments in this area...
Stuart Huggins
Multimedia Designer
Technical Artistry &
Digital Design Productions, LLC
www.taddproductions.com
Re: P2 Archival Solution - Quantum SDLT600A by Arthur Aldrich on Apr 26, 2007 at 1:06:38 pm
There were 2 interesting announcements from Quantum regarding MXF tape drives.
First, Quantum announced a new LTO drive that is twice as fast (70MB/sec) and greater capacity (400GB) for the same price as the 600A (about $8K list).
They also announced a price reduction on the 600A to $5500 list. You should be able to aquire that for close to $4000.
There have been several improvements to the interface, via free firmware updates.
I also spoke to the Quantum engineers at NAB, amd they seem very interested and dedicated to improving the interface.
Re: P2 Archival Solution - Quantum SDLT600A by Eric Hansen on May 17, 2007 at 7:25:01 pm
i've had one of these units for a few months now and i can't sing its praises loud enough. i havent really explored its MXF-aware capabilities yet, however. i bought it needing a way to clear off our Xsan and archive 1.5 years of projects ranging from feature films to episodic TV to podcasts and web. i needed about 4TB of archive space in-house and would also need a second copy to be stored out of house. and i didnt want to deal with hard drives as i have been burned in the past on failed hard drives. granted its a bit slow - it averages about 30MB/s on our GigE network, but it has allowed us to archive many projects, and in the case of a few, bring them back online into FCP with all media reconnected in about 3 hours for a 70min feature film. imagine doing that from DVD-R media.
we use a program called AutoCat that will catalog the contents of the tape, then we copy this catalog (which is just OS X aliases and folders, just like Finder. you dont need another program to read the catalog) over to our server. this allows us to do a Spotlight search for a clip, then Spotlight tells us what tape its on, then we grab the tape and transfer the clip via the 600a's web-based FTP to any ANY computer in the office.
another thing thats much different than the old DLT workflow is that this drive is very fast. the directory is available in about 15 seconds, and it can find a file anywhere on the tape in less than 2 minutes at the most.
at the level that we work at, we are used to $65k for an HDCAM deck using $55 60min tapes. many of our competitors just copy their P2 footage to HDCAM because that is what they are used to. they know they have a tape. many broadcasters do that with their HDV footage too. they can't really imagine a tapeless world and in most cases need a 1080i copy on hand that will work with an HD-SDI system. HDCAM is convenient. my bosses are a bit like this too. a 300GB SDLT tape is $78 and can hold 30min of Uncompressed 10-bit HD, 5 hours of DVCPRO HD 1080i60, or 14 hours of 720p24 footage. thats a big savings over Varicam, HDCAM or HDCAM SR tape.
when we mastered our last feature, it fit on 2 SDLT tapes as both a media managed project and a final Quicktime that we used for printing to HDCAM. this also included every alternate version of the movie with all the different graphics and soundtracks. because we used this method, we only had to print a third as many HDCAM tapes for our library and our distributors. this has saved us quite a bit of money.
some people say the deck is too expensive and hard drives are cheap (and getting cheaper). but when your alternatives are a 1400 Varicam deck for $25k, $65k for an HDCAM deck, or hard drives that have a reliable shelf life of only 5 years, a $5k SDLT deck really starts to look like a steal. and like a previous post, when Apple adds native MXF support to FCP, this system will become even more valuable. you can really think of it as a data VCR. for my workflow, it has been a huge time, money and space saver.
theres very few people who have used one of these decks, so please feel free to ask me any questions. i took a risk when i bought this thing because there wasnt much experience out there to draw on, but i'm so glad that i did.
Re: P2 Archival Solution - Quantum SDLT600A by multiple words on May 22, 2007 at 4:13:44 pm
Eric, thanks for the info. Can you tell me about the '600GB compressed' capacity? Does this work? Can I really expect to get 600GB of data per cartridge?
Re: P2 Archival Solution - Quantum SDLT600A by Eric Hansen on May 22, 2007 at 8:18:24 pm
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.
Re: P2 Archival Solution - Quantum SDLT600A by David Jahns on May 23, 2007 at 10:01:34 pm
I'm very interested in this P2 archive solution, yet our IT manager AND our video engineer consultant have nothing but horror stories about DLT tape archives. Whether it's decks that won't read a tape format from a 3 years ago, or simply mechanical breakdown - they cringed when I told them we wanted to get this deck for our P2 archive solution.
Supposedly, the LTO format is much more robust and stable - but not enough so that they would give it their blessing. The Video guy wants us to lay off P2 footage to HD-CAM SR tape, then digitize from that (for matching timecode), and the IT guy wants us to burn Blu-Ray discs at 25GB per disc - which would be 40 discs and take 40 hours for a project with a TB of raw footage. Obviously, that's not what us editors would prefer to do...
Can anyone out there tell me they are wrong, and that you have consistently restored projects from years ago using DLT tape?
Re: P2 Archival Solution - Quantum SDLT600A by Eric Hansen on May 24, 2007 at 3:13:00 pm
the horror stories you speak of, i remember well. but they are most likely referring to DLT tapes and drives that maxed out at 80GB compressed (DLT III and IV) and were used mostly for office data backup or DVD Replication (which we still use one for). SDLT is a much different and more robust system. like comparing DVCAM to HDCAM and saying they are the same since they are both video tape and are part of Sony's CAM system.
laying off to HDCAM SR is a very expensive alternative especially since a $70 SDLT tape can hold 14 hours of 720p24 or 5 hours of 1080i60. i would suggest regular HDCAM if you want to go this route since the benefits of SR are lost, IMHO, on P2 originated footage (for example SR is 4:4:4 but DVCPRO HD is 4:2:2). i have colleagues who do this, but i feel that its unnecessary.
LTO is actually a great tape system and what our telecine company uses. but you have to decide what you're using it for. if you have one workstation that will connect to the drive via SCSI or Fibre, both SDLT and LTO will work great and i would go with LTO since it has higher storage capacities. also the SCSI version of the 600 drive is much cheaper than the Ethernet 600A and can sustain much faster read/write speeds. but, the SCSI 600 doesnt have the MXF aware system and can only be locally attached and not available to multiple computers through the web browser-based FTP. i also want to say that it only works with Windows, but i can't say that for sure. we're all Mac over here. if you have a SAN based system, dedicating one workstation to a SCSI SDLT or LTO drive could work great. if you have multiple independent edit systems, the ethernet-based 600A will be a better option.
we have only been using this system for 5 months, but it has been completely error-free and we have brought many projects fully back online with no lost media. i just brought a feature film back online because we have to bleep out some cussing for TV broadcast, but the process was fool-proof. i couldnt imagine bringing that project back from DVD-R or Blu-Ray media. although things may change in the next few years, i like the fact that these tapes have a shelf-life of 30 years. i havent heard what the official shelf life of Blu-Ray media is. and of course hard drives are the fastest way to bring stuff back online, but i've talked to some photographers who recycle their hard drives every 2 years because of fear of failed drives. that gets very expensive over time, even with falling prices.
hope that helps. also, call Quantum and get some advice. they wont try to sell you something (they leave that to their resellers) and they will give you good honest advice about different tape systems and what will work best for you. you have to bend your mind a bit to get away from TC-based video tape for archive. P2 users have done that for the most part by switching to a tapeless recording system, and are the most accepting of this SDLT workflow.
one last thing i should add. we have also added the SDLT600A to our office computer backup system. so we are using the deck for both video project archiving and our regular office computer backup system. 2 birds with one stone.
Re: P2 Archival Solution - Quantum SDLT600A by gary adcock on May 24, 2007 at 3:29:43 pm
[Eric Hansen]"i would suggest regular HDCAM if you want to go this route since the benefits of SR are lost, IMHO, on P2 originated footage (for example SR is 4:4:4 but DVCPRO HD is 4:2:2)"
slight correction --HDCam SR does not only record 4:4:4, it handles 1080 at 4:2:2 and 720p 4:2:2 also. It would require something like a Kona card to transcode the DVCPROHD content out via DUAL LINK HDSDI and you would not gain anything by archiving in RGB other than a lot of hassle. Regular HDCAM recording is only 1080 @ 3:1:1 so the user actually looses data if they do not stay in the SR series deck.
I am glad that you are happy with the 600a also, I have been using one since NAB and have been very happy with the unit and the performance.
gary adcock
Studio37
HD & Film Consultation
Post and Production Workflows
Re: P2 Archival Solution - Quantum SDLT600A by Eric Hansen on May 24, 2007 at 3:55:36 pm
thanks gary, i'm glad i got corrected on the HDCAM SR point because my experience with that deck has been very limited and i dont know about all of its options. we were thinking about going that route with our 16mm archive, but we decided against it in the short term because of cost. but we will probably revisit it in the future. our in-house deck is the HDW-M2000/10. we wouldnt switch to SR unless a significant project came along that would justify the cost.
when you record 720p, what is the total capacity of the tape? i assume that it would increase, like HDCAM where a 40 min tape holds 50 min of 24psf. or does the deck not record like that?
david, i should also add that Quantum will let you demo the 600A.
