Sunday, August 4, 2013

The Scrapheap Of History

We've gone tapeless and these things are headed for the dustbin.

8 comments:

drjim said...

Digital or analog?

Roberta X said...

Eeeek! I hope thet remember what happened to NBC: dumped their tape library. No backup. Now if they want old video, they have to pay the guy who dumpster-dove the tapes and took them home.

Turk Turon said...

Jim: the gray ones are analog, the green ones are digital.

RX: ABC is backing up to optical disk.

drjim said...

Pretty cool.

When I was working at DirecTV we were 100% Digital Beta, because that's what the movie studios would send us to make the pay-per-view files from.

The tapes came in an armored car, with some big, well armed, nasty looking dudes bringing them in.

Considering how much a digital master of a 1st run movie is worth, I can see their point.

Turk Turon said...

There is also one digibeta (the blue box) and one real oddball: a beta SX in the yellow box.

We have a few video files of Major Motion Pictures at the office. Typically they arrive by messenger on a terabyte portable hard drive. Typical size of a 2-hour movie is 150-GB for 1080p24 ProRes. God only knows how big the Digital Cinema files would be.

drjim said...

I left there in 2004 and I don't remember how big a movie was, or even how many tapes it was on!

Old NFO said...

Glad 'somebody' is going to have backups... :-)

Roberta X said...

Ahh, poor ol' DirecTV. When I dropped them, they kept wanting to come up with some way to keep me (and they're still hounding me with special offers). I kept explaining it wasn't their fault that all the channels I used to like started to stink on ice -- most of them after NBC or some other conglomerate had bought them and downgraded the content to yetis, UFOs and Hitler. But DirecTV was convinced if only the price was low enough, I'd sign back up. :(