Think You're Ready To Go Tapeless?
By Bill Pryor

This article was inspired by a text message I received on my cell phone recently. It came from a friend who works on a lot of video features in a city noted for a wide variety of film and video production work. Here's his message:

"We just found out the ****ing data management dude for the HVX lost 3 days of footage. God I love tape!"

That's the sanitized version. Much of his frustration was vehement and unprintable. Even on this particular low budget production, costs were in the neighborhood of $25,000 per day with talent, crew, craft services, location fees, transportation, and all the other good stuff that costs money on a shoot. The details will remain obscured here to protect the guilty; suffice to say it was an operator error. The typical operator error involving tape is to rewind to review a scene and then fail to re-cue properly and record over part of a good take. An operator error when dealing with tapeless file transfer is almost always worse.

Losing three days worth of footage is pretty extreme. I've heard of other losses due to problems with data management when shooting tapeless, but nothing that bad. It shows dramatically the perils of shooting tapeless without thinking through the work flow thoroughly before committing to the format. On one local shoot in my area the production was put about a day behind schedule due to file mishandling, and most everybody who pays attention to these boards has read of other disasters. Some have involved file corruption and technical problems, but it seems to me that most of the time the difficulties occur in the realm of not checking or backing up footage before reformatting the cards. This does not mean shooting tapeless is a bad thing. It simply means you have to understand the workflow and have the budget, time and temperament to deal with it.

Tapeless shooting makes sense for TV news where lots of footage may be shot every day, but it's all edited immediately and the original isn't archived for long. If you're doing documentaries or narrative movies or corporate/educational/training work, going tapeless at this point may not make sense unless you have a bigger budget and more time than many of us. Many Hollywood productions that originate digitally are now recorded directly to hard drive arrays and/or cards. The new SciFi Channel series, "Sanctuary," is shot with the RED One. But for those of us who shoot microbudget narratives or documentaries or make a living with more mundane types of video work, well...budget and time are big considerations and most of us don't have the personnel or time for the increased work of solid state location data management.

At this point there are three varieties of tapeless shooting:

• XDCAM / XDCAM HD
• Hard drives
• Memory cards

XDCAM HD is the only one that allows you to record your footage to something fairly permanent in a single step. You shoot to discs and file them away just as you would tape. XDCAM discs are only about $30 each for an hour or more of recording. Not much more in cost than HDV tape and much cheaper than HDCAM tape. XDCAM makes sense if you want to go tapeless, but we're talking a full size camera and $30K or more with a decent lens. XDCAM seems to have wide usage in TV news and some production but not so much for individuals and low budget production where the 1/3" chip cameras are so popular.

Hard drives that are portable and designed to work with cameras have come down in price, but you still have to transfer the footage to something you can keep, assuming you want to keep your footage for a number of years. Plus, most 1/3" chip cameras have the cheesy little 4-pin firewire ports, and it's easy to break the connection if you're doing a run-and-gun shoot.

Solid state memory cards include at the top end, Sony's SxS cards for the 1/2" chip EX1 and EX3 cameras, Panasonic's P2 cards for the HVX type cameras, and SD cards for the little single chip consumer cameras shooting the AVCHD format. Panasonic also has a 1/3" chip camera, the 150, that uses the SD cards and the AVCHD format.

Both the SxS and P2 cards are too pricey to file away in a box at today's prices. The consumer cards are getting way down there in price, and you could buy all you want, really. But for more professional shooting, using SxS or P2 cards requires an additional crew member with additional equipment, in most cases. You fill up a card, pass it to a person who I call the Data Management Dude (DMD), and he (or she) then offloads the contents of the card to a computer, checks the files to make sure they transferred properly, backs up the files to another drive, then deletes the data on the card so you can reuse it.

The main benefits of a tapeless camera are random access when reviewing footage, faster than real time loading into the NLE, and of course a lower cost camera. It costs less to make something that doesn't have any moving parts than it does to have a tape recorder built into a small camera. However, there ain't no free lunch, and you'll pay at the other end with higher crew cost or more time spent in data management after the shoot.

I'm not saying you shouldn't go tapeless if you want to--I'm just saying that before you take the plunge, you need to think it through very thoroughly. The potential for human error is high, and the costs can be more than you may think when looking solely at the camera's price. I would assume that on a big production the producer would purchase insurance for technical failures, if that's possible. If so, it's an added cost, but the more obvious costs include the DMD's daily rate (or salary if you're an in-house unit), the cost of a laptop computer and additional drives, plus the cost of more cards than you probably think you'd need.

For illustration purposes, let's say you go on the road for a week and shoot lots of interviews for a documentary style production. Say, you shoot about two hours of interviews per day for five days. that's 10 hours of tape, if you use tape. When I go out of town, I always take at least a box of 10 one-hour tapes. If it's a documentary style thing, I'll take two boxes. I use Sony's PHDVM Digital Mastering tapes, minis, and they're about $17 each. So, $370 for a box of 10, $740 for two boxes, or 20 hours.

A Sony SxS 16 gig card is about $850. That gets you 50 minutes of recording time. Unlike Panasonic's proprietary P2 format, Sony doesn't have a lock on its memory cards, and you can buy them from Sandisk too. Prices are falling, but I'm going to go with the current B&H price for the Sony brand. And, I'll stretch things a bit and call that 50 minutes an hour. That means 10 hours of digital storage cards would be $8,500, or $17,000 for 20 hours.

That means 10 hours of digital storage cards would be $8,500, or $17,000 for 20 hours.

Preposterous, right? Right. Same for Panasonic--since Sony's EX cameras hit the streets, the price of P2 cards has dropped a little, and a 16 gig P2 card is also $850 at B&H. You get almost as much time on P2 but only when shooting 720p at 24fps. For real-world purposes, the cards are about the same, though with SxS you can stick them into a new laptop with no need for an adapter.

Nobody's going to buy $17,000 worth of cards for a shoot. If they can afford that many cards, they would probably be shooting HDCAM or Varicam (both tape, by the way). Instead of buying all those cards, what they do is hire a DMD--Data Management Dude. This is a guy (or gal) who understands the system and has a good laptop computer and extra hard drives for backup. What I would do is buy four cards, and as soon as one is finished, hand it off to the DMD so he can be uploading and checking the files while I keep on shooting. And that file checking is critical--just re-read the opening lines above from that text message I received. It's not enough to simply copy the files and assume everything's there.

Panasonic has a portable hard drive that you can transfer files to, I've read, and also a recording device that allows you to transfer the files to an external drive.. But the recorder costs more than a good laptop, and the hard drive is only 60 gigs, so you'd probably need more than one, and it's pricey. Still, regardless of what you use for data offloading, you need the DMD to do that and check everything. There's no way I would erase the contents of a P2 or SxS card without first verifying that I have transferred ALL the data and that there is no corrupt data and that the shots all play OK. That's a time consuming process, and it requires an attentive, responsible person who's not afraid to let you know immediately if he has a problem or if he screws up. The director also has to have the temperament to take a deep breath and start re-shooting if there is a data management problem. You do not want to intimidate the DMD--he may be the most important person on your shoot.

All shoots, of course, don't require 10 hours of media. You might go out and shoot only two cards' worth of footage. But, you have to then go back to your studio, download the footage, check it thoroughly, and then make backups. So, while you may get by without a DMD on location, you become the DMD when the shoot's over. On that out of town shoot, you could also do the same thing--take your own laptop and drives, leave it all set up in the hotel room, and at the end of every day, come back to your hotel and do the data management (while everybody else is at the bar).

Hopefully I've made my point here: Going tapeless requires careful data management. Somebody's got to do it. If not you, then somebody you pay. Either way, it takes time and attention and extra gear.

With tape, I spot check takes by hitting the return button. Sometimes I may check an entire take. You'd probably do the same thing shooting tapeless. With tape you have to be more careful to re-cue at the end. With solid state, you can start shooting again without worrying about recording over something. That's nice. But today, most all cameras I know about have a very handy end search button, so it's easy to get back to the end of your tape. Still, you want to be careful with that, as every pro is.

At this point in the status of video technology, I have to come down on the side of tape as the most logical, economical and reliable media for the type of shooting I and many others do. It's cheap, it's reliable, and you can stick it in a box until you're ready to edit. Solid state cards are expensive, must be re-used, and the work flow is more complex. Complex processes can lead to errors and lost work. Lost work in the video business is fatal.

And speaking of workflow, recently I did a bit of research on the consumer AVCHD camcorders to see if I wanted one of those, as a second "pocket" camera, over something like a Canon HV30. After all, the consumer SD cards are just about as cheap as tape, so why not? I like the Canon HF10 and HF11 in the single chip consumer category. Some reliable reviews say their footage is just about as good as the HV30's HDV footage. However, you have to edit it. Final Cut Pro can do it, if you have an Intel Mac. But it's a hassle. It has to be transcoded to Pro Res, and if you mix it with HDV, you have to transcode the HDV to Pro Res, creating much larger file sizes. And people who do this say you need lots of computer horsepower.

Eventually AVCHD will be easier to edit. In its early days HDV was a pain too. But for now, I'd beware of that codec. Whether it's a small consumer camera or a larger one like the new Panasonic 150, which looks pretty good, actually...except for the editing issues. Those who follow such things are saying that in a couple of years, maybe less, AVCHD should be easier to deal with in the editing phase. If you are the kind of person who thinks he must own the camera that shoots the newest codec, and you want to go with AVCHD, I would advise waiting. When AVCHD becomes more editable, that Panasonic camera will look very inviting--moreso than the HVX200a because it uses cheap SD cards. In a year or two, it could become the camera of choice for low budget filmmakers who can't afford the Sony EX series.

In my case I am considering a little consumer camera for certain types of shots I can't get with my larger camera. After a few days of research, and checking out the cameras in person, I'm going with the Canon HV30, the HDV camera (assuming I decide that I really do need it). Why? Because it shoots HDV and tape. I see no reason to create more hassles in order to avoid tape. Tape has treated me well.

I probably will one day abandon tape, as I abandoned film, but not until the tapeless world becomes more workable. I define workable in two parts: (a) a media that's inexpensive enough so I can afford as much of it as I need without having to take a DMD on location, and (b) a codec that edits natively as easy as HDV does today in FCP. I think those two criteria will be met eventually, but they're not there today.