Freelancer Q:- Tape vs Tapeless projects . . .

. . . actually this is open to anyone working professionally in FCP . . . what ration of your jobs are now shot using tapeless media? not looking for fractional percentages just marginal comparisons, out of interest . .

Cheers,
Bluey

100% tapeless here.

Haven't touched tape in about 2 years now. We use an external facility when the odd bit of client archive footage shows up for ingest, or a client needs tape playouts for broadcast or whatever.

Otherwise, tape is way too expensive to operate and maintain these days for the minimal amount of demand.

I would say 80% tapeless 20% tape. Places with lots of expensive infrastructure take longer to change than smaller outfits with good budgets. That said, all the TV stations here are tapeless now, I think.

Peronally: 99% tapeless (ProRes 720p & 1080p) / 1% tape. There are 3 Senior Editor / Compositors here at EA SPORTS (Tiburon) and I personally laid off 1 (ONE) tape this year fro ESPN. The other guys ship out to ESPN more regularly so they touch more tape than me because ESPN is still one of the stubborn ones that haven't figured out a tapeless workflow so they make us overnight them DVCProHD tapes as needed.

We have 5 Ki Pros and get Ki Pro drives from shoots. I mainly deliver digitally via Aspera or to station FTP.

When life gives you dilemmas...make dilemmanade.

I see where this is going. The whole freak out over L&C being "gone" from FCP-X. No body not under NDA knows that yet. How do you feel about the possibility of it being gone though? Would a 3rd party solution be enough for you or will this raise the ire of FCP editors everywhere?

80% tapeless.

No way they can do away with a way to ingest tape -- there will be something built in, even if it's not accessed by pressing Cmd-8 anymore, or called "Capture".

Agree. We have too much archival stuff yet to dump tape ingest.

There's the rampant speculation about the FCP changes regarding Tape I/O and then there's the current shortage of blank tape stock.

The stock shortage is temporary but it is forcing some producers to consider tapeless delivery if they haven't already. I can't imagine what it's like being an independent freelancer with your own HDCAM camera right now.

ak
Sleeplings, AWAKE!

I have one client (Blue Cross Blue Shield) who still need Beta SP delivered for two, count 'em TWO stations that don't take digital uploads. Everything else is not only tapeless, but goes straight to the web...

If FCP X doesn't have L&C I won't cry about it - I plan on keeping FCP 7 on one system anyway.

About 80% of my projects originate on videotape and are delivered on videotape. Most of these are for large companies.

Working off tapes for Disney, ABC Family and CBS (for their image campaigns type of shoots).

. . . interesting responses, my personal prediction is a move to tapeless projects across the board with stuff possibly being shot on video for that specific look, or since so many years have been captured on these formats, for facilities to remain thus enabling such footage to be digitised.

editing aside i'll surely be hanging on to my old dv and hi8 cameras - no plug-in is ever going to top the real thing

Bluey,

Depends on the job. Long form docs, 90% tape. Especially natural history films - no one is pulling out a laptop to download cards/sticks in the middle of the Amazon or on a canoe or in Alaska. I personally know of a series in Alaska that was getting a ton of corrupt cards because shooters were downloading the cards correctly or removing the cards from the camera correctly. They went back to shooting tape.

For more non-broadcast short form has been about 90% tapeless. But all broadcast deliverables are still HDCAM tapes. But I know of one PBS affiliate that accepts XDCam discs as masters. I kinda bummed XDCam discs aren't more popular. I'm not a huge fan of the codec but the medium is awesome. Random access like tapeless, don't need deck to ingest, and have a physical medium to archive on a shelf like a tape.

And all archival footage is still 100% tape.

Chi-Ho Lee
Film & Television Editor
Apple Certified Final Cut Pro Instructor

Quote
bluey
editing aside i'll surely be hanging on to my old dv and hi8 cameras - no plug-in is ever going to top the real thing smiling smiley

Uh...no. Actually plug-ins today do make footage look as good as "the real thing". You just have to know how to tweak them. The reason I personally hang on to old cameras is for conversion purposes.

When life gives you dilemmas...make dilemmanade.

grafixjoe Wrote:
-------------------------------------------------------
> > editing aside i'll surely be hanging on to my
> old dv and hi8 cameras - no plug-in is ever going
> to top the real thing smiling smiley
>
>
> Uh...no. Actually plug-ins today do make footage
> look as good as "the real thing". You just have to
> know how to tweak them. The reason I personally
> hang on to old cameras is for conversion purposes.

. . . yeah some plug-ins are great, guess i'm just a sucker for out-and-out authenticity!

Bluey,

For all of you that are delivering tapeless, (as opposed to tapeless acquisition) I am curious if any of this delivery is "long form" episodic TV.

For :30 spots, it is clearly quite practical to upload a finished quicktime movie. But it doesn't seem so practical for a 23 or 47 minute HD show. Do you upload 75GB? All of the major network episodic delivery that I have worked on lately requires D5 or HDCAM SR tape.

Just curious.

More and more we are shipping 500GB or 1TB externals by courier to deliver stuff. Some broadcasters still ask for tape though.

On a related note, I really love how things like Vimeo and YouTube mean you can now work remotely and get approvals minutes after an upload, instead of needing the relevant people onsite, or you on theirs.

Good point Adam. Mine is mainly Short Form (3 minutes & under) with the occasional 10 minute b-roll for the MMA Fight Night on Showtime's "Strikeforce".

When life gives you dilemmas...make dilemmanade.

>More and more we are shipping 500GB or 1TB externals by courier to deliver stuff.

Interesting. What codec dp they usually ask for? ProRes? Mpeg50? What do they ask for HD? Do you need to courier the drives back?



www.strypesinpost.com

A lot of ProRes, especially if they are on FCP. But we deliver whatever they want it in. Some clients we pass the drives back and forth, but one off clients we tend to just charge them for the drive and let them keep it. The cost of externals is negligible now. Not that much different to high end tape.

I was at an X Media Lab on the weekend with everyone shooting 60Ds and I think that will be delivered to a broadcaster who wants a media pack just as the raw h.264 selects, so they can do what they want with it at their end.

I worked on a show once, where my producers convinced them to take file based media simply because it was a lot cheaper than renting in a deck or going to a tape house. So it's really not just the price of tape, but also the cost of getting in the deck, the time to edit to tape (real time), etc...

One problem is with stations that have not migrated to a file based archival workflow. Those would probably still prefer tape.

This is the first time I'm hearing of file based delivery for long form. I do prefer tape delivery especially for overseas clients, because it's a more robust (you know you can drop the tape and the data is still there), but file delivery is much easier, as long as they don't ask for uncompressed HD onto a USB drive.



www.strypesinpost.com

Hey Andy, how do you guys send large video files across? Signiant?



www.strypesinpost.com

My main global client's projects are episodic TV and they are all tapeless delivery.