Going Tapeless

Most of us video types who've been around for awhile are kind of stuck on recording on tape. However, even us oldtimers have to admit that file based recording is upon us. Since 2006, SSV has been offering on-board hard drive recording in parallel with tape.

Our DVCAM cameras have been mated to nNovia Quick Capture on-board hard drive, recording Quicktime .mov files or .avi files. We also offer the FireStore FS-100 DVCPRO 50 or HD hard drives, recording in Quicktime and P2 file modes. We also offer P2 solid state recording, for the ultimate in reliability and convenience. A single 16Gb P2 card can record 43 minutes of 720/24P Native footage.

Our Sony and Panasonic cameras can take advantage of these on-board hard drive file base recording solutions, which yields many advantages, such as; back up recording, long recording capacity(5.5 hours in DVCAM, 6.5 hours in 720/24P Native DVCPRO HD), very fast file transfer to hard drives and non-linear editing systems, thumbnail fast access to multiple clips, no need for an expensive tape deck that requires realtime ingest vs. file transfer in a 1/4 of the time.

These file base recording options yield time and money savings over tape based capture and ingest. Files can be transferred to a client's hard drive in the time it takes to label the days tapes. The clips are easy to log and edit ready.

It is understandable that many of us are most comfortable with tape based acquisition, but after taking advantage of file based acquisition and ingest, it truly is hard to go back to the time consuming, costly workflow of tape ingest. We invite you to try our hard drive or P2 recording solutions on your next project, we think you'll be happy you did.