Media Storage Solutions for Videographers (page 2)
Data Anywhere, Anytime, on any Connected PC: Cloud Storage
Storing data in the cloud (aka the internet) is gaining in popularity. One impetus is Byzantine border crossing rules designed to control data taken into or out of the US. Custom officers sometimes view the contents of travelers' laptop hard drives, even going so far as to confiscate laptops and examine them for several days. One solution: don't carry data with you. Upload it to the internet.
Amazon.com pioneered this service in 2006 with its Simple Storage Service (Amazon S3). Now dozens of companies, large and small, offer cloud storage solutions. Advantages include no extra hardware needed, data accessible anywhere at any time and easy-to-share data. Disadvantages include slow data throughput (no faster than your internet connection) and potential data loss if the storage company goes out of business.
Amazon continues to up the ante. Because uploading a terabyte at T1 speeds (1.5Mbits/sec) can take about 80 days, now you can ship your hard drives to Amazon. The company uploads the data and returns the drives within a couple of days.
Storage for the Long Haul: Blu-ray Discs
Archiving assets from a completed video project is something videographers deal with all the time. Simply putting the original Mini DV cassette on a shelf is one solution. But most video-editing software products offer an alternative: archive only the assets you used (with head and tail frames) in a single file folder. That can still consume a lot of hard drive space, so how do you archive the archive?
Recordable Blu-ray Discs might soon become the best solution. A recordable Blu-ray Disc holds up to 50GB, plenty of room for a few hours of DV or HDV footage. Shelf life is at least several years, long enough to wait for low-cost petabyte storage. The caveat is availability. Blu-ray Disc (BD) burners are getting to the point of being widely available, though they aren't yet commodity items (like DVD burners have become). However, as of June 2009, only LG offered a set-top Blu-ray Disc recorder in the U.S.
Media Storage Solutions for Quick and Easy Portability:Flash Drives
Flash drives are the mainstay of computer studies students. A typical thumb-sized drive holds upwards of 64GB (the equivalent of 14 DVDs). Plug them into any USB port, and they appear as a hard drive within seconds and perform at near hard-drive speeds. Unlike most external hard drives, these solid-state electronic devices don't need an AC power supply. You can format them as FAT32 drives (instead of NTFS or HFS+), making them cross-platform compatible with any computer running Windows or Mac OS X.
Trends
Videographers need fast and deep storage. High performance hard drives will likely be the solution for the time being. But solid-state electronics are making inroads into the standard desktop PC data storage market, acceptance of cloud computing is growing and it probably won't be long before a student tells me he's got "a petabyte in the car."
Jeff Sengstack is a video producer, an Adobe Certified Expert in Premiere Pro, and author of three books on Adobe Premiere.
Manufacturer's listClick here to download a PDF Manufacturer's list of Videomaker's Storage Buyer's Guide 2009.
