DV Magazine - Real World Video Storage Solutions

2 Months ago I received an e-mail from James Careless, Editor for DV Magazine, who had some questions about the way RaffertyWeiss stores their media & backups.

After some brief phone calls and lengthy e-mails, here is the result!

http://dv.com/article/91754

It's a great piece that takes 5 different production companies and compares the way they store their video.

From the article...

RaffertyWeiss Media has Video Storage Figured Out
Some production companies are overwhelmed by the task of video storage and asset management. RaffertyWeiss Media of Silver Springs, Maryland, is not one of these. In fact, according to associate producer John Lofton IV, RaffertyWeiss has devised an end-to-end video management system that works.

“First and foremost, every time we have completed mastering a video (right after the final color correction and audio mix) we request an uncompressed QuickTime copy,” says Lofton. “If it's a fully digital project, we just export this QuickTime movie directly from Final Cut Pro to our 'Masters' drive. This is the easiest method.”

“However, if it has been laid to tape — Digibeta or HDCAM SR — we ask the duplicator to capture it to an uncompressed QuickTime on an external hard drive of our choice, which we then courier back to our office to be copied to our masters drive,” he adds. For safety’s sake, the company keeps master Digibeta, HDCAM and HDCAM SR tape copies of its videos stored on the "masters shelves." “We have over 200 masters spanning two bookshelves!” Lofton says.

As for those old videotapes that can sit in closets, out of sight and out of mind? RaffertyWeiss does not have them. Instead, “we have captured all of our 'old' tape-only masters to uncompressed QuickTimes and stored them on the masters drive as well,” says Lofton.

Finally, “every couple of months or so, we use our Wiebetech 4-door SATA drive enclosure to duplicate project drives,” Lofton notes. “We back them up using simple 'copy and paste' in Mac OS X. Since all of the drives are connected using SATA, this process only takes a few hours.”

So much for storage. What about searching and retrieving videos? To do this, RaffertyWeiss employs a two-category approach. “All masters are separated into 'Spots' and 'Long Form' categories,” Lofton says. “Spots are generally :30 to :60 in length and are in a broadcast ready format, whereas Long Form videos can be anywhere from two minutes to an hour!”

“Within both folders is a 'Compressed for DVD' folder,” he continues. “This is where all DVD-ready, compressed elementary streams are contained for whenever we need to create a Demo Reel. I have separated video and audio streams into 'AC3' and 'M2V' folders. This helps keep our videos and demo versions of videos organized and ready to be output to Demo DVD at a moment’s notice.”

At present, “our process is pretty simple,” Lofton concludes. Still, “if the volume of project drives and master videos increases significantly, we may have to consider changing to a NAS network storage system. But, for now, this method works just fine for us!”

By James Careless

In other news; Never Met Her Music Video has been undergoing a long delay due to the artist Moses Haughton & Co. who will be visiting LoftonFilms tonight for a very important meeting. We will keep you posted on the details!

John