Tape(less)
These days, no sooner does someone bring out a cutting edge, competition beating capture format, then a whole new one comes along. With new decks costing upwards of £10k, keeping up is expensive - especially when you factor in service costs for older decks. Our clients bring us all sorts of formats to transfer, edit from or master to and it’s been really interesting following the trend of what we’re being asked for over the last few months.
Perhaps unsurprisingly, with lower end prosumer cameras offering DVCAM at increasingly affordable prices, DVCAM tapes come through the office on a particularly regular basis, with HDV following close behind. In fact, we’ve just had to retire one of our DVCAM recorder due to overuse and upgrade our other (newer) machine with an SDI I/O card to replace it. But it’s that old stalwart, Digibeta, that we see most of - and very happy we are about that, too. It’s great quality and our Sony J3 and Thomson decks are incredibly user friendly, which makes life easier!
We still get the odd DVCPRO and BetaSP tape through, but the decks spend most of their time lounging in front of the pool waiting for the call to arms. It wasn’t so long ago that we were running them both almost continuously, but with Panasonic championing their DVCPRO-HD and P2 and BetaSP taking an ever decreasing slice of the market, they don’t see the action they once did.
So, what about the future? Well, whilst we’ve toyed with buying our own HDCAM recorder, the speed with which the industry is moving towards data and solid state (oh, and the £50k price tag) has kind of put us off a bit. We do, of course, have full access to HDCAM decks and recorders when either we or our clients require them and have just recently completed conform and mastering on several HDCAM based projects.
It’s going to take another few months before we get a clearer idea of which direction the standards are going to head, but we’ve got our eyes on introducing a meaty Bluray archiving system and we’re still championing the REDONE as the frankly jaw dropping all rounder that it is. But, in the meantime, we’ve just won a contract that will see our 40 VHS decks called back into service for a good couple of weeks. So, in honour of the format that refuses to die, here’s Blockbusters’ Bob Holness from 1985.