Large productions back up all footage to multiple LTO-4 tapes immediately and are shipped to safe storage. Even small productions have been doing that mostly because they can't afford as much storage. If you're worried your disks will blow up, you should consider doing that. It's cheap insurance. An LTO-4 tape is cheaper than a reel of Vision3.
cool .. are they as distracting on video as they can tend to be on stills?
I was wondering how long it would take before someone mentioned that. By profession, I'm a disaster recovery/business continuity architect, and don't understand why anyone would ever get the idea that a hard drive might be a safe place to archive data. Even at home I keep my data on RAIDs, regularly duplicate it to other RAIDs for a quick fix, and back it up to LTO2 and keep a set of those in a fireproof safe (though I really should use the safe deposit box my bank has provided).
They have to. It's the only format that's insurable.
I wasn't talking about data loss during the production or post process. I was talking about loss of data years after release. Years after you've finished working on a project you're still going to be babysitting the relatively fragile data.
Put your reels in the attic for years then tell me about data loss. If film didn't suffer from this too, we wouldn't have restoration releases and some people would be doing something else in the film industry.
Magnetic media requires constant environmental control but no more than film. LTO tapes are incredibly resilient.
True enough, but I've pulled out 40-year-old 16mm negatives that still looked like they'd just been shot. On the other hand, I pulled a whole case of Agfa stock from the early 60's for telecine a couple of years ago and about 90% of it was bright pink. Of course, B&W stocks last a lot longer. None of these things are going to stick around as long as the ceiling of the Sistine Chapel, though. Not without constantly being transferred to new media.
Its amazing how quickly after HD arrived that anything less was considered crappy and old!
What kind of BS is this? Only Nikon has good lenses? LOL! Only Nikon has a "sensor plane" that can "discern subtle changes in light and color"? And only Nikon's sensor has this "vast ability"? This is absurd language. Any credible, reasonable, objective person will know that Nikon's lenses are no more "grand" than Canon's, and their sensor doesn't have any more of a "vast ability" to "discern subtle changes in light and color" than Canon's. This is simply non-sense, propagandist, hyperbolic marketing language that has no substance or merit.
To the best of your recollection. With digital, at least you know when and how severely digital media has degraded. Error correction and redundancy can usually prevent complete loss of data and warn you that the media is reaching its end of life so you can duplicate your data.
Well, digital can be duplicated without any loss of data so do that regularly and it will last forever. Every duplication of film results in some loss.
Yes, it is more labor intensive because you can let your film quietly rot without doing anything. Once you start getting errors on magnetic media, you're forced to do something about it. I am amazed at how resilient magnetic tape has become in the past twenty years. Those clunky 9 track and QIC tapes which already had excellent life spans in controlled environments have evolved into AIT and LTO tapes which have decades of life and very aggressive error correction. These tapes will outlast us all if kept in a protected environment.
If you're constantly checking your archival copies to make sure the media isn't showing errors. If not, well...
I have not examined quality of video in Canon cameras but quality of video in D90 is so terrible, wobbly jelly image, splitting image, every time I see it I feel I want to vomit.
And how often do you check your film archives to check for signs of deterioration? Making a new archival print of deteriorating film stock is not a DIY project. It's expensive, requiring the labor of experts in film restoration in order to not cause even more damage.
Except for the methods I've mentioned.
Interesting that the line drawings made from his photos which were actually printed in the newspapers have not deteriorated at all.
I honestly never open up a can of negative stock unless I need it for something. There's stuff I haven't looked at in decades.
True enough, but like I said, most of my film stock looks like it's going to outlast me.
Which is the point I've been making. You have to keep re-copying digital files to new media because there's not really any dependable archival media yet.
True, but there isn't. Meanwhile, we have 2 types of media that are both prone to deterioration over time. If one of them can be duplicated at any time without the loss of any original data and the other one can't, the former is the logical choice for now.
I don't think anyone was ever arguing for a return to film. I was just saying that overall it was a lower maintenance format. You put it on a shelf and forget it for the most part. Digital requires vigilance.
