No need to go through any of those to simply move the bits from one medium to another. You only need them when you actually want to do something such as play or edit, and they are only software.
MBQ
You're assuming everything is on an HD these days. It's not. DigiBeta is still in use and that's a tape based format. Tape is still a lot cheaper than any other storage medium - especially if it has to be kept for some time.
If say you're a small independant documentary maker, and decided to use solid state recording on the camera as some do, it has to be downloaded at the end of the day to something else - like a server - as the memory cards cost about 1000 quid. A similar time tape perhaps 50. Of course these prices can and do change.
Everything we make that is HD goes onto SR tape, which while not totally uncompressed, (is only compressed once (444 to 422)) remains lossless from then on.
Even high end productions like LIFE don't use uncompressed in the field because the cameras and recorders are to impractical. DVCProHD or file based systems like RED are usually used.
There isn't mush debate in reality because telecine machines can only practically scan film at SD, HD, 2k (ok for 16mm), 4k (4096×2160 - about
8Mp) or more rarely 8k. 8k is considered indistinguishable from the original media
Irrelevant. Once it's digital, bits are bits. You can copy the bits between as many different formats as you have hardware support for, whether it's tape, disc, magnetic, optical, homeopathic, or whatever. You still don't need to worry about compression or encoding formats until you actually want to do something with the data.
MBQ
I don't think you quite understand my point. At some point it has to be transferred to some kind of HD or whatever. And there could be many many hours worth of material. And saying you can copy any digits is a nonsense. You still need software to read it.
snip
It's turning into the can of worms I wanted to avaoid in the first place :-(
Baz
Maybe we are talking at cross purposes. My original point, in response to Nicknoxx, was simply that to do the copying of bits from one media to another (yes there may be many terabits) you do not need access to any tools to interpret those bits. They are just bits, nothing more. The assumption is that the software can be ported to at least one of the hardware platforms that you have copied the media to, to allow you to interpret the bits in a useful way at some future date.
MBQ
If it is just the *memories* that you want to keep alive, the quality and size are not so important, but availability to all those who might want to share them is. There are, of course, numerous on line ways for you to store and share family albums and information. There are even some handy family tree making bits of software (I have a very good free one on my pc, whose name escapes me at this minute: ah, remembered:
Forget the disk interface: just make sure the disk is inside a computer that talks NFS or SMB over a gigabyte network.
when the whole setup goes flakey, buy a newer setup and transfer from one of the TWO machines that you purposely have for exactly this sort of eventuality.
But I know what you are going to say. :-(
Just to put things right, they were not my tapes, but a someone I know that is very good company. He is very rich, but never dwells on the fact and is very down to earth about everything in life. He has just bought a new Merc spots car and thinks it is the best car he has ever owned. I haven't seen it, as he doesn't flaunt it to us.
I did wonder about that, as I am slightly red green colour blind, the reds in old films always looked a bit odd to my eyes.
Of the four tapes I have got put on DVD (not by me) the last one was the most disapointing, as it was the first one that he took in the hall that he owned in the Ribble valley.
Recordable DVD is poor too. Commercial DVDs use a
Thanks Dave, most informative. I thought I would get the best answer from you.
Dave
well 10Mpx is as good as a 35mm frame unless it was shot on kodachrome
25 with a top class lens..and at 25 frames a second, that's a raw bit rate of mm. 10/8*3*25=90Mbytes a second..?so a three hour film raw and uncompressed is just under a terabyte, I make it.So the answer is not to use the HD format, but to dump raw, for archival purposes.
I've compared my 10Mpx camera with my best 35mm slides: the camera is almost as good as my very best lenses. Its certainly better than all but Kodachrome 25 in terms of ultimate resolution. Cranked up to about
200ASA the lens, the pixellation and the noise are all in the same ball park.Its way better than most 35mm movie film stock, shot probably with a cine version of the same angenieux lenses.
That's still better than mots DVDS etc. Of the home burned sort.
But actually, in a decent temp controlled environment, a disk that isn;y spinning will last a long time. I helped resurrect some data off some old Acorn hard drives..probably 20 years old..got most of it.
I say that IS the pro solution:
Ive got 40 year old slides. Kodachrome and agfachrome are fine: some others are totally washed out to the point where extreme measures are needed to correct for them
On holiday a few years back I grabbed my other 35mm body, and discovered it had a film in it. Turned out to be 1993 slide stock - Fuji - well I shot stuff with it, and got it scanned at a lousy 2Mpx, BUT although the world had gone a lot greener since 1993, the slides of notre were fully correctable after piddling around with Photopaint for an hour. Once more the sky was blue!
so pictures keep well as pictures actually. take your digits to the photo processor and turn them into color photos. Those will do 50 years.
I've got a server here, that simply does a nightly 'mirror of anything that's new, and data' from one hard drive to the backup one. As you say, disks last about 5 years. Then I will simply build another, pull the data off whichever drive still works, and get going for another 5 years.
Thanks - but remember it's mainly opinion.
Only 40 years? Pah, going through my fathers stuff we have boxes and boxes of black and white prints from when he was an avid cyclist/climber around Europe from the late 1920's to the start of WWII, all perfect. There are some strange mounted metal (might be a degarrotype of some sort) images from the early 1920's taken on a beach they are very faded but scanned in and some hefty processing have returned some very acceptable results. There are a few of posed photos that date back to 1915, they are fine.
There are albums with photos of my grandparents that probably go back to 1900 ish, they are in excellent condition for, maybe, over, 100 years old.
Or *much* longer in a "nice" enviroment. All this has been stored in "shoe boxes in the bottom of a wardrobe".
I think you will find that it is the older pictures - just like the older books, and even newspapers - that keep the best. B&W on high quality paper was the norm a century ago: relatively unstable dyes on rubbish paper are pretty universal now, and good paper is expensive and rarely used. Even slides get eaten by moulds - as has happened to my colour slides from the early 70's. It always impresses me how I can pick up a book over a century old, and find the pages not only unyellowed, but press cuttings within, also unyellowed! Buy a 'hard back' book today, and the edges of the pages are already yellowing a month or two later.
S
And better than that, you now delete pics that don't come up to scratch, whereas with film you were stuck with them - expensively so - but this is getting off topic: the advantages of digital for most uses are legion.
Su00$3lv$ snipped-for-privacy@news.albasani.net...
You can now afford to use the very best paper for the ones you really want to keep, assuming you can find somewhere that will print them for you.
MBQ
HomeOwnersHub website is not affiliated with any of the manufacturers or service providers discussed here. All logos and trade names are the property of their respective owners.