Rogue Tapes No More!
History repeats itself. Once again production companies are flooded with tapes—and nobody is really sure what’s on them. Haven’t I seen this movie before?
Back in the 80s and 90s, media production offices were absolutely filled with video tapes. They came in all shapes and sizes, from clunky U-matic cassettes to sleek new Sony formats. If you were lucky, there was a label on the tape. If you were even luckier, someone made a log of what was on the tape. But each tape stood alone.
Not that the industry didn’t try to bring some order to the chaos. Somewhere during the 90’s Sony created a robotic tape library called Petasite. (cough). It never caught on.
Of course, master control suites had (and have) automation systems for tapes ready to air. Library systems emerged with rolling shelves that could hold thousands of tapes. But fundamentally, the tapes were opaque. If someone didn’t record what was on them, you literally had to watch them with a pen and notebook in hand to log the footage.
Then, in the 90’s, video image recognition brought hope. Companies like IBM pioneered fast object recognition software that would find things it knew, like a “speeding red car,” and then record that information based on the video timecode. MPEG 7 became a metadata standard to record and save this type of information.
But mostly the industry anticipated the divine prospect of digital.
Digital files could be easily assembled in one place. We could search an index with every file on it! Media Asset Management was born. There were whole conferences dedicated to MAM!
Unfortunately, the volume of digital eventually overtook us. We had to learn terms like Terabyte, and Petabyte, and now Exabyte. The number of files and the volume of files grew—and continues to grow. Where do you put it all? How do you find it all? The Cloud? Maybe. But every megabyte in the Cloud costs money every day, which gets costly, fast.
Finally, debuting at NAB in 2009, LTFS tapes! LTFS, the Linear Tape File System, now an industry standard, was placed on the LTO form factor and now we had a way to put a LOT of digital stuff on a single tape. Even better, the capacity of the tapes began to grow. LTO5—1.5TB. LTO6—3.0TB. LTO7—6.0TB. LTO8—12TB (available today.) That’s a lot. And while systems exist to keep those tapes in robotic libraries, the single-tape LTO/LTFS drive has flourished in the media industry. Cheap and cheerful, a small drive can ride next to any editing system for secure, inexpensive backup.
The drawback? They create stand alone tapes where the content is opaque!! You canread a tape, but you have to stick it in an LTO/LTFS drive and look up the index to do it. The result? Those tapes are piling up on shelves all over the country. And you may have no clue what’s on them.
We call those Rogue Tapes. While they function perfectly well on their own—they don’t integrate into a library, or self-describe.
How do you tame rogue tapes? You create a system that can read them, and index them, allowing anyone, anywhere in your organization to search their contents — without having to put them in a tape library. If they stay on shelves, that’s fine. At least a central index will know what’s on them. If you ever upgrade to even the smallest tape library, all of your tapes will be library-ready, further enhancing workflow.
When we saw all those tapes on the shelves—it really looked like the old days. But there is a promise to the conversion from analog to digital—you just have to do things right.
Today, we’ve now got access to solutions that can finally eliminate rogue tapes. Wanna learn how to de-rogue your production? Check it out: roguenomore.com.