Who is using Blue Ray or HD DVD to backup P2 content?

Ooo...ooo...NOT ME!

Sorry.

I'm using bare SATA drives that I connect via a USB>SATA connector. Cheap and holds TONS of stuff.

Shane

I used a DVD5 for 4 GB p2 cards, and a DL DVD9 for 8 Gb p2 cards.

I do a redundant backup to hard drives as well.

There aren't any HD DVD burners available yet to my understanding.

yeah...I am waiting for Blu-Ray burners to drop in price before I invest. But that would be a secondary backup. I'd still do HD backup as well.

Shane

Tony:

The technology is still new, and the workflow is still being fleshed out.

Tape backups have long shelf life and are relatively painless.

50 GB blu ray backup will hold about two hours of 720/24pN footage, but encodes take about five hours.

As to shelf life, it depends on the quality of the blank.

From what I've read, good solid brand name quality DVD backups last 20-30 years.

Cheap stuff degrades early. Tape backups seem to be the best of both.

What other questions do you have?

how long do expect to hang on to that HD? Will it mount after sitting on the shelve for two years (or more)?

I expect them to last 5-10 years. I mount them periodically to get them spinning. THis is a stop-gap measure until HD DVD and/or Blu-Ray becomes more reasonable.

Also do you use the default names from the P2 files (i.e. 001xx, 002xx) or do you rename them on ingest.

ABSOLUTELY NOT. If I am editing, and lose a drive....the media drive...how would I know what to reconnect? If I renamed 0004FGX.mov to "Jackson rallies his men," how would I know that "JACKSON" was 0004FGX.mov? I have hundreds...THOUSANDS of clips. No, I name AFTER I import, and keep the original clip name in my renaming.

If you rename them how, are they connected to the back up files. It's not like a tape capture where timecode is all that matters, is it?

Via NAME ONLY. This is the bad part of FCP...it doesn't look to tape name (card name in this case) and TC when relinking...it looks to NAME ONLY. Which is bad...which is why I never rename.

How much time does all this take?

Depends on the amount of footage. But a while. From the field drives I back up to G-Raids for the duration of the show, then import into FCP and name. Then when the show is over, I archive to internal drives.

Tapeless is the wave of the future. Panavision records to hard drives in the DPX format (the Star Wars Prequels)...RED records to hard drives, Panasonic to P2 and Firestore...other drive solutions in the works. And I do like my tape, but gotta move where the river takes you.

Shane

I would look at LTO tape drives. The LTO3 (or is it up to LTO4 now?) hold hundreds of Gig of data today and they are fast. In fact, the drives can be had on eBay for a few hundreds of dollars. Most of them have SCSI connectors so they may or may not work in the Mac ( I know they work on the PC ). The people I speak with who know, say the DELL or IBM LTO drives are pretty good for the money. In fact, IBM makes Dell's LTO drives.

For what it's worth, we're shooting everything (except run-and-gun footage) directly to Hard drives. This skips the ridiculous cost of P2 cards, card readers, decks, etc.
Once the democratization process moves from cameras and software to solid state storage, we'll re-think our flow.

For what I've read here, most are using hard disks and then dvd's. Based on my personal experience, you cannot trust hard disks alone. They will faill, especially if you are using RAID 0 for speed... one fails and you'll loose everything. In my case I had the external power supply failed and not the actual drives but it was too late when I discover the true fault.

Since P2's are 8GB (new 16GB now available), you can treat each P2 as a "reel" and back it up to a DVD+R DL if it happens to be greater than 4 GB in size. Even with the availability for the new high-capacity DVDs (HD-DVD & Bluray) the cost still does not make a lot of sense for the individual or small business. I'd love to find a good external data tape drive but what I've found are with outdated interfaces. To add to the madness, DVDs also fail. New expandable/Redundant storage technology look very promising, like the Drobo, but is only USB 2.0.