Perhaps the most interesting thing about Red’s recent price list is the range of solid state recording options — CF, ExpressCard, 1.8″ SATA flash, and Red RAM. The Red RAM is basically a Red Drive, but with two of the new 32 GB flash-based drives, instead of two 160 GB mechanical drives. It’s the three other options that are really interesting, though, because they’ll allow people to use generic commodity flash memory, in their choice of formats, for recording. Care will be required — many CF cards, at least, don’t really have enough performance — but this is an amazingly forward-looking move, and further reenforces my earlier point that Red appears to be taking its cues — both in terms of pricing and the openness of the system — from the computer industry rather than traditional camera vendors.

Solid state memory isn’t quite at the prices we’d like to see for our own use, but prices are dropping very fast. We’ll be passing on these options initially, to see how things settle out with the various formats, but if I had to guess to guess I’d say we’ll probably pick up the 1.8″ SATA flash interface (it’s a user-installable part) within 6-8 months of buying the camera. Probably sometime next year we’ll be able to pick up a 64 GB version of this sort of thing at a reasonable price. Recording ~40 minutes of 4K on something smaller than a credit card is pretty amazing. It’s the sort of thing that reminds you that, despite the lack of flying cars, you really are living in the futuristic year of 2007.

It’ll be interesting to see how Panasonic, which currently sells its P2 solid state memory at 5x the price of commodity flash memory, responds to a camera which can actually use commodity flash memory.

Having basically ruled out optical storage, we’re left with two major archiving options: data tape and hard drives.

The leading high-end data tape format is LTO-3. Drives are available from many vendors, and you can expect to pay upwards of $3500. Tapes are 400 GB, and cost around $55 if you shop around, though you have to buy tapes in 20 packs (over $1000) to get prices like that.

This makes LTO-3 media a lot cheaper than hard drive space; it’s about $0.14/GB, or $0.23 per minute to store REDCODE RAW 4K footage. In contrast, you can get a 500 GB hard drive for around $200, which gives you a price of $0.40/GB or $0.66/minute for that Red footage.

But, of course, you have to take into account that big up-front cost for the tape drive. When does that pay itself off? Let’s do some math.

Assume $480 for a 1 TB hard drive (Hitachi is shipping these in Q1 in an external case (or a bay of a multi-bay external case, much more on these in a later post), and $4000 + $60/tape on the tape side (a price you can get without buying a thousand bucks worth of tape at once).

At these rates, the tape drive pays for itself when you’ve got 12 TB worth of data to store. If you’re storing 24 TB of data, tape is down to $0.32/GB, while hard drive storage is still $0.48/GB. For 40 TB of storage, tape is down to $0.25/GB.

So, which should to pick? Well, tape is a bit of a hassle vs. hard drive storage (much more on this aspect of archiving in a latter post). And 12 TB is a good bit of storage, even for 4K (well, compressed with REDCODE, anyway). It’s enough storage for ~120 hours of footage. If you’re making a documentary or a reality TV program you’ll probably need more storage than that fairly quickly, but that’s enough storage for all the footage comprising ten 100 minute narrative features shot at a 7:1 shooting ratio. It’s probably going to take a while to shoot ten movies, by which time hard drives will probably be more competitive, since hard drive prices tend to drop faster than tape prices.

Based on these numbers, this one is going to be a tough call for a lot of people.

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.