LOCATION:
Macaroni Grill, Provo
IN ATTENDANCE:
Micah Anderson, Carter Durham, Garrett Batty, Zach Batty, Michael Eager, Jacob Hoehne, Mike Johnson, Cammon Randle, Dave Crenshaw
TOPIC:
Archiving media - new media trends
COMMISERATE:
Cammon mentioned a podcasting conference he spent good money on hoping to learn something, only to discover he had more to teach them.
CELEBRATE:
I'm on week two of my iPhone and I think it's a keeper. The portable media player has been great for showing people what we can do. It has some features I wish it had, but overall, I really like it.
Where is the media industry going from here? Cammon said he's heard of people who think Net content will overtake Network content. While your "average Joe" does have more access to media creation and publishing via the Internet, YouTube style video isn't likely to make the likes of NBC and ABC extinct. Zach shared a quote in regards to that sentiment, that with the advent of the Power Bar no one thought it was the end to meals as we know it. What is more likely to die out, according to Zach, is the Network TV schedule in five years or so. Beyond TiVo, will we have a 2 TB drive connected to a monitor that plays our stuff - ESPN only without having to pay for Bravo - feature films in a digital form, YouTube etc.? The less the media is fixed in a tangible form, the harder it will be to keep it from being ripped off. We stand as both consumers and creators of media and have to keep a foot in both camps.
How do these changes bode for content creators like ourselves? It's interesting to look at the desktop publishing "revolution" in the 90's. Now, anyone could do layout and print without having to go to a typesetter and a designer and all of that. Did that mean the end to graphic designers? Not at all. It lowered the barriers to entry in the industry, and a flood of would-be designers, but the true talent still rose to the top.
It does seem that the trend is only towards more media saturation, for better or for worse. Moving images - be it flash or video (and that line is quickly disappearing) - is becoming the communication medium of choice.
We did touch briefly on media storage and archiving. Right now, we're shooting mainly Panasonic P2, which means there is no built in archive like tape. We've been backing up our 8 GB cards to Dual Layer DVD's, which per gig is actually pricer than hard drives. However, we recently got a 16 GB card which doesn't fit on any DVD we can burn at the moment. We have looked at a LaCie Blu-Ray burner which will do 25 GB on a side and 50 on dual layer (but I'm unaware of any blank media that is dual-layer at the moment). Another strong contender is a LTO-3 drive. It's like a DLT drive of yester-year for DVD replication, but one tape will hold 400 GB. The DLT drives are painfully slow, but the LTO's are actually fast enough to read/write from like a hard drive (65 mbps through put). No clunky SCSI connection either - it mounts via gigabit Ethernet. Sticker shock: $5,00 - 8,000.
What are your thoughts? What other topics did we discuss that you'd like to weigh in on?
Regards,
: : Jacob : :
Subscribe to:
Post Comments (Atom)
3 comments:
I'm running out the door, but I wanted to take a minute to thank Jacob and his Issimo team for all the time and effort they put into CoNNECTiSSiMO. It's great for us to see what others are doing, and pass around ideas.
Jacob, I'm curious as to why you are looking into tape storage, as opposed to hard-drives that can be stored off-site? Are tapes more reliable?
Tape is a proven media archive format and has a long shelf-life - decades.
As you mentioned, hard drives have to be warmed up every so often and only have a reliable shelf-life of 5 years (if you're lucky).
The 400 GB tapes also only take up the size of a DLT and cost $40 or so.
But I haven't sunk the money into it yet because of the price. There just has to be something better than hoping a drive doesn't go - or have two drives you hope don't die.
What do you think?
Hello, sounds like a good meeting - too bad I missed it.
It is a great debate but I am seeing less of tapes being used today. Tapes are _supposed_ to have the longest shelf life but I have heard of many people getting bitten by broken tapes, or them not being readable or even an old format of tape that doesn't have a way to be read by current machines or an old connection like something older than SCSI.
I guess what I am trying to say is it can be scary. It's hard to know what the best format can be for the long run. DVD's have been known to last as little as 2-10 years sometimes. HD's can physically fail because of the moving parts.
I am seeing drives being used more often today as "archiving" mostly because the price has come way down and they are what they are - they can plug into a system basically as is, or get a hot swappable reading device instead of paying 10k for a tape system.
But lets put it this way if you really want to be safe you implement two levels. For example for backups the deluxe standard today is to go to drives first and then tape or even drives as the next layer.
Post a Comment