The 'tapeless office' myth

[Widescreen]

I tried posting in 'General' and got no response, so will double post here..........

Recently we have been looking at new cameras for an upgrade of our gear in the next year. We have undergone a number of trials, which are still underway as we speak. I don’t want to get into that at the moment, but the change in what we shoot on has posed some new questions on how we operate.

So I want to put it out there………

Has changing to a ‘tapeless’ format made a huge change to the way you ingest your material and how do you do it?

For example, for years we have had reporters who horde tapes on their desks, we take a week to tape turn before they are erased, tapes are handed willy nilly to anyone heading in the direction of the news room! And so on. I think you get the idea.

There was a lot of hype about a ‘paperless office’ which never really happened, so I was wondering about the tapeless office.

I am looking for feedback on how things may change for the better or the worse.

 

[amp]

Our digital newsroom

We have a "mostly" tapeless office. We shoot on P2, edit on Avid, and archive on DVCPRO.

Most important thing of all--make sure EVERY photog gets a P2 Store. This is important because have a P2 Store to copy your P2 cards to in order to have the cards out of the camera for the shortest time possible. It's been a year and we haven't lost a card yet. And since they can be over $2000 each, not losing them is good.

Just 2 things to help manage the P2 Stores better. Underneath the battery, there is a Verify switch. TURN IT OFF! All this does it double check what you copy and take twice as long to copy the video. Also, eliminate as much vibration and shaking when you are copying a card into the P2 Store (especially if the Verify switch is still on) You could lose a clip if you have a lot of shaking, and it really has to be A LOT! But, it is much, much more likely to lose a clip from vibration if you have the Verify switch is on.

We clear the cards every day. The clips we shoot stay in the Avid system for a week before they get erased. We do have a Hold and a Specials folder if we are keeping things indefinately.

 

[Bismarck]

We are about 95% tapeless. Everyone here shoots on P2 except for:

1) Brand new shooters (NY1 is a little different, we hire people with absolutely zero photography experience). They shoot on DVC for their first 6 weeks.

2) Our Local Edition insert people, because they have a completely independent ingesting and editing system, and we just haven't converted them over to P2 yet.

3) Our Borough reporters, although they're about to switch over.


Ingesting happens at 5X real speed now because of this, and our video quality is orders of magnitude better.

 

[Nooze Hound]

My old station has a tapeless newsroom.

They shoot on DVCpro, then enter that into the non-linear machine, that file is shot directly to MC and queued for the show by the producer. The archieves are put on DVD. It saves space, and they're a hell of a lot cheaper then DVC tapes.

If you want more information I can give you the e-mail of the engineer. I haven't worked there for a couple years. But he and I are still good friends. He might be able to tell you more specifics then I would.