The RED ONE is clearly going to generate a very large amount of data, even using REDCODE compression. At the 28 MB/s rate quoted for 4K, a minute of footage will be about 1.65 GB.

How do you deal with all of this data? This will be the first in a series of posts discussing archiving; it will address optical storage options. Future posts will address tape and hard drive storage options. The subject of online (working) storage will also be addressed in the future, in another series of posts.

For people with busy schedules, here’s the executive summary. How do you store hundreds of gigabytes of footage cheaply and conveniently on optical discs today? You don’t.

Standard single-layer and dual-layer DVDs can be ruled out immediately. A double layer DVD would only hold a bit over five minutes of footage, which is not remotely practical. But just for the record, storage costs would be about $0.35/minute to store REDCODE 4K footage on double layer DVDs.

Blu-ray and HD DVD have higher capacities. Maybe they’re more plausible? Not at the moment. We can probably write off HD DVD for the same reason we wrote of standard DVDs. A 15 GB single-layer HD DVD disc (the only sort your can presently burn) will only hold about nine minutes of footage, and the drives and media are far more expensive, even per gigabyte. A 15 GB HD DVD disc costs around $18. That works out to about $1.98/minute. Yikes.

Blu-ray is slightly more plausible. Single layer Blu-ray discs hold 25 GB. That’s 15 minutes of footage. Better — people seem to manage numbers in this range with film reels — but still not exactly ideal. A burner will set you back around $900, which is a lot… but a 25 GB blank disc costs around $20, for a per-minute cost of about $1.32/minute. This beats out HD-DVD, but it’s still quite pricey.

All media prices assume you’re buying in quantity.

These optical drives also all share another major problem — speed. Even 2x Blu-ray burners — the fastest of the formats — only burn at about 9 MB/second, which means recording a minute of footage takes three minutes. Read performance is similarly slow, making it impossible to play footage back directly from the disc, thus eliminating one of the major advantages optical storage would otherwise have over data tape.

So, while high capacity optical media might seem like the wave of the future, it isn’t practical at this point. Even if all these prices fall by 50% by the time Red starts shipping cameras, is still won’t be very practical.

In the next post in this series, we’ll turn to that stalwart of high-capacity data storage, still going strong in the 21st century: tape.

This entry was posted on Monday, January 8th, 2007 at 6:32 am and is filed under Hardware, Red, Storage. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can leave a response, or trackback from your own site.