How do you archive?

X

Xchroma

Active member
the wheels are turning in my head tonight. I was trying to think of a superduper archive system but i have no idea how everyone else archives their stuff.
So how does your shop do it? Is it easy to do? Do you hate the system? is there something you wish could become automatic about the process?
Please include details about what your shop shoots on, what they edit on, what they archive on, and what system they use to log and search their archives.
Thanks!
 
O

OmegaRed

Well-known member
We're completely tapeless. We...

Shoot on XD
Edit on Edius
Archive in Precis (If you work for an NBC station its the same thing as your Newschannel service).

You can search the archive via ENPS or directly in Precis. Then export the video from precis, and drag and drop the video file into the rundown. Producers are responsible for archiving all video in their shows.

We love the system. Our only problem was that for the first few weeks, nothing was getting archived because we were told by our vendor that the archiving process was automatic. But now that producers know that its not, they archive manually and do so by clicking a little box by the story slug in Precis and then clicking "Send to archive".

Its WAYYYYY better than tape archiving.
 
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F

Fearless Leader

Active member
we shoot on Beta SX and archive onto 184 minute SX tapes. We use Newsflash, (which apparently no one has ever heard of) for our editing, and that's how I assemble the previous day's work.
I basically go through, and put all the finished pkgs and local vosots and important national pkgs in one timeline (or sequence). Then I export and EDL as a text file, that list of the clips and their respective timecodes are stored with the tape which are listed by date. The script info is archived through ENPS, so we can search by slug name and then pull it from the date.

The system is pretty solid, not great, timecode errors or any inconsistency in the tape/edit list can screw up multiple days of archiving. We have lost material, but the great majority of stuff is archived reliably. The only other problem is of course pulling the tape and needing to re-digitize material.
 
amp

amp

Well-known member
We shoot P2, edit Avid, and archive to DVCPRO on the oldest DVCPRO machines on God's Green Earth.

We are supposed to get an Oasis to archive onto, making us fully tapeless. Other stations in Raycom already do it. Anybody in Raycom land who has it already? Do you love it? I hope you do, because our tape deck are awful!
 
P

Pause

Member
Archive?

My last station just made the digital transition. It was (and continues to be) a bumpy road. They shoot P2, edit Edius and archive in BitCentral. It was always ridiculous to me that if someone forgot to put a little check mark in a little box, the story would be lost forever. I lost a sweeps piece that way. Archiving on hard drives isn't archiving.
 
A

Auto Tranz

Member
Pause said:
My last station just made the digital transition. It was (and continues to be) a bumpy road. They shoot P2, edit Edius and archive in BitCentral. It was always ridiculous to me that if someone forgot to put a little check mark in a little box, the story would be lost forever. I lost a sweeps piece that way. Archiving on hard drives isn't archiving.
Click to expand...
I was always from the school of thought that said "always archive on tape just in case the 1's and 0's give you the green weenie..."

Archiving to a hard drive scares me ****less. I'm a computer geek, so I know that hard drives fail.
 
S

SamG

Well-known member
We shoot on P2, edit on Leitch ESX (precursor to Newsflash) and now FTP onto a portable hard drive. We used to playout to DVCPro, but that required changing all HD footage to SD. Now our editor just drags and drops (from inside the Leitch software) whatever they want to archive. Our plan is to get about a month (maybe a little more) worth of archiving onto a HD.

We have a column in ENPS that editor put the month and day the piece was archived. Drives will be labeled with time periods they cover. You find the correct drive, plug it back in, open up the day folder and reimport your video... still HD.

The bad thing is we're copying the leitch proprietary files, so if we ever go to a different editor, we'll need to provide for flipping archive footage.

I actually had our chief editor email me saying she likes to archive. :)

Oh, and yes, drives can go bad, but have you ever had a tape get eaten in a machine?
 
svp

svp

Well-known member
I have to admit I like archiving on hard drives but I'm with Auto Tranz, there really isn't any substitute for tape. What will your station do if you take a power hit that fries or corrupts the drives, leaving you with absolutely no way to retrieve ANYTHING??? I think everyone should use hard drives as a primary archive but back everything up on tape just in case. My computer took a hit about two years ago and I lost EVERYTHING. The only stuff I could salvage were the things I had burned onto DVD, which was very little.
 
M

Minnesotan

Well-known member
Shoot XDCam and archive to DVC Pro in SD(shows air SD) and if the story's shot in HD, I archive it to an XDCam disc.

I still don't trust only archiving stuff to drives.
 
M

marstaton4

Well-known member
I'm almost positive any of these tapeless archives are getting dumped to a RAID array which provides lots of redundancy. The drives are mirrored to at least one other one and I'd put money they are on a UPS as well. Not 100% failsafe but I'm sure it's close.
 
svp

svp

Well-known member
Bismarck said:
Shoot on P2, raw archive on DVD.
Click to expand...
Wow, archiving to DVD is worse than hard drives. I use to do it this way too but DVD's eventually get scratched and/or degrade over time, rendering them unusable. I would not recommend DVD as an archiving method. My old station archives on DVD and after about a year, they were finding that DVD's were getting lost or were scratched to the point where they couldn't be used. They've lost alot of stuff because of archiving on DVD. I know DVD is cheap but if you're spending the money to shoot on P2, why not spend a little to ensure you're stations material isn't lost forever?
 
B

Bismarck

Well-known member
The finished stories are saved to duplicate archive servers and tape robots. The DVDs are just for raw video. They're just copies of the P2 cards brought in from the field.

The DVD method isn't a perfect solution, and when we completely switch over to 16GB or larger cards we're going to have to figure out something else. But until then archiving the raw stuff to DVD is no different than having a shelf full of XD Cam disks, so it's an ongoing issue that a lot of people are going to have to figure out.
 
M

Minnesotan

Well-known member
I think we just ordered a Blu-Ray burner to start archiving stuff onto Blu-Ray. I would imagine that it would be full files, not compressed.

I would say that archiving to XDCam is quite a bit better than archiving to a DVD as the XDCam disc is more durable than a DVD.
 
B

Bismarck

Well-known member
svp said:
Bismark, my apologies. I thought everything was archived to DVD.
Click to expand...
Nah, the DVD thing is the remnant of a plan to archive every bit of raw video that we shoot. That plan was a bit watered down and now we only save the raw of stories that could conceivably be useful in the future. The DVDs are just direct data copies of the 4GB P2 cards.
 
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