There are countless components that go into any production. Media and entertainment professionals have to plan ahead to have the right technology, equipment and resources that will help them produce the best project possible. The post production piece can be just as important as the others, ensuring that the hard work is protected.
In that vein, having the right strategy in place to protect and preserve those projects is essential. Many are turning to LTO tape with Linear Tape File System (LTFS) to help satisfy not only technological requirements, but also specific budget requests.
For content creators, every piece of content that gets created is extremely important. They simply can’t run the risk of losing anything. Having a storage medium that they can trust is just as important as the equipment they use to create the content. LTO tape with LTFS is making storage decisions easy, since accessing files is as easy as dragging and dropping the data selected, similar to a removable USB flash or external disk drive.
How does it work? Using a media partitioning system, data is stored on the tape creating an index file system, allowing for easy access to the files stored on the main ‘content’ portion of the tape. What this means is that a producer can use LTO tape – which is much less expensive than solid state drives or video tape and more reliable than external hard drives – to offload content that was captured during filming or to archive older content that production firms want to keep around ‘just in case.’
Having a storage medium for professionals that saves both time and money is extremely rare. When HD videotape was first released, producers were caught losing time transferring content from their video tape to their editing tools. It would take just as long to transfer as it did to shoot.
The archived version required a lot of space, time and money to store. The switch to digital gave content producers an affordable way to capture footage on memory cards and offload the content to an LTO tape. Hours of content on one memory card could be transferred to LTO tape in a fraction of the time. Thanks to our newest generation of LTO technology (LTO-6 tape) producers can store more than 3TB of (uncompressed) content in a single cartridge, saving space that would be taken up by hundreds of videotapes.
Every year, we look forward to connecting with media and entertainment professionals at IBC. If you are looking to simplify your storage solution
