Words You Can Use: The BAVC BLOG

By Angelo Sacerdote, BAVC Preservation Specialist

I learned how to splice super 8 film when I was a kid. In college, I learned how to edit video with an edit controller and a pair of U-Matic decks. I’m glad I never had to work with 2 inch Quad video (we have a dusty old Quad deck in our basement, if anyone wants to make an offer).

Today, many editors are starting off with Final Cut Pro, digitizing DV tape over firewire. With the advent of formats like IMX and P2, editors are soon going to skip tape altogether.

Many of us are used to thinking about hard drives as something you buy once in a while to edit on, something to be reused after the current project is over. Now that we are starting to embark on shooting in tapeless acquisition formats, we need to think of hard drives as the new tape. Now when you start a project, you must budget in the cost of hard drives as your permanent storage. As it turns out, it is cheaper to do this than to buy traditional video tape. For every “tape” you should have a backup “tape”.

If you are shooting DVCPRPO HD on an HVX200, for instance, your files will be about 40 GB per hour. That means on a 500 GB hard drive you can fit over 10 hours of video. You can buy a 500 GB Lacie USB 2.0 drive for about $130 (and getting cheaper). That is less than $13 per hour. Compared to DVCAM tape, which is over $15 per hour, this is a bargain. Of course you need 2 of these drives for redundancy and a separate drive or array of drives for editing.

Besides economic advantages, hard drives are an improvement over tape because they attach directly to the computer, eliminating the need to own expensive playback equipment. However, like tapes, hard drives can fail. In either case you need backup.

I have been reluctant to declare tape dead. Hard drives make me nervous, but they are more reliable and cheaper than ever before. There is no such thing as a permanent storage medium for digital files, so the best we can hope for is a medium that makes it easier to migrate to a future cheaper, more stable medium. Hard drives fit the bill.
Hard drives are the new tape.
Tape is dead.
Long live Television Tape!

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