Archive notice: This article was originally published on September 10, 2010. Links and embedded videos are preserved as part of the historical record.
Three trends are shaping the AV industry: falling costs for optical storage media, growing data volumes due to HD and 3D, and longer archival guarantees for Blu-ray Discs. These are the factors fuelling the success of Blu-ray Discs as an alternative to hard drives and expensive memory cards.
“In recent years, prices for optical storage media have fallen dramatically. Particularly in the area of Blu-ray Discs, the cost per terabyte of storage capacity has fallen from 800 euros to around 100 euros today. Their increasing spread in private households will reduce the price even further,” explains Jürgen Sattelmayer, Vertical Business Manager EMEA at Rimage. “Moreover, video professionals are becoming increasingly aware of the weaknesses of storage media such as hard drives. Here, Blu-ray Discs have gained ground with a reliable archival guarantee of up to 50 years and have developed into an attractive alternative. The task now is to offer solutions that make backing up and retrieving data on Blu-ray simple and convenient. Blu-ray Discs are particularly attractive to the growing number of freelance camera crews who need to back up video recordings quickly and cost-effectively.”
In Amsterdam, with support from Como Computer & Motion GmbH, Rimage is showing newly developed Media Archive Workflow solutions. These make it possible automatically to back up video files from P2, SxS, RED and SDHC cards, including descriptive metadata and proxy preview clips, to Blu-ray Discs for archiving and NLE post-production.
The ProxSys Media Archive solution from Como Computer & Motion is used for this purpose, combined with a Blu-ray burner system from Rimage.
The combination of hardware and software is aimed primarily at users of P2, SxS, Sony Professional Disc, Focus FS DTE and other storage media that need to be read and backed up quickly. The stored files are provided with individual metadata so that they can later also be found immediately in content-management systems. To make research easier, when the data is backed up to Blu-ray, a Flash preview file is automatically created and stored alongside the metadata. Users can therefore search for content with a web browser, including over a network, and access a preview version. The content found can then be read from a Blu-ray Disc as a high-resolution original file and edited.