Ursecta

LTO software

As I mentioned in an older post about storage alternatives, I’ve been running YoYotta to back up to LTO tape, but for a while now, I’ve been looking for alternatives.

Don’t get me wrong, YoYotta is an excellent piece of software, very solid and has a million features for managing huge libraries of video material. But for several reasons, I can’t use 80% of what YoYotta is best at.

For instance, it’s fantastic for locating and collating video material for reuse, but first of all that’s not what we do, and secondly that doesn’t work for ScreenFlow files since they’re proprietary and YoYotta can’t decode them. So I’ve been using only the LTFS part of YoYotta and for my use it is lacking a number of features I’d love to have.

On top of that, they switched from a “buy it once” model to a yearly subscription recently and even reading old tapes is not enabled without an ongoing subscription¹ So this makes it slightly iffy to ensure recovery over the long term. Not to speak of the MacOS support for SAS adapters and stuff like that.

LTO tape error rates

I have always wondered what the normal error rates are on LTO tapes. Now I know, or at least I know what the error rates are for the tapes I have.

The 51 LTO-8 tapes I have in my pool have an average of 1.1 recoverable errors (read and write) per TiB read and written. But even though I only buy HPE tapes, the green Q2078A ones, I know they more or less randomly actually come from either Sony or Fujifilm, the only two manufacturers of LTO tapes in the world. You can’t make it out by looking at the cartridge, but the built-in EEPROM in the cartridge holds that information, such as manufacturer, date of manufacture, lot id, total bytes read and written (lifetime) and six types of errors, also lifetime scoped. With a bit of software, you can get all that data from the tape cartridges.

Apple M1 and the future

This past week, Apple announced their first ARM M1 based computers, also called “Apple silicon”. As expected, they’re pretty good. Not so expected is just how much better they are than the previous Intel-based machines. It’s an understatement to say that the Intel machines were blown away (somewhat to my chagrin).

Storage and backups

When you do video production of any kind, you quickly run into two problems, namely having the files organized so that you can effectively find them, and secondly, the insane volumes of data to manage. I sortof knew that movie studios had massive data volumes, but I didn’t realize that even a moderate operation like ours would produce so much data.

The Sound, part 2

Up to this point, we progressed from pretty darn awful sound to pretty much decent sound, but I wasn’t entirely satisfied yet. Time to take the next step. A friend recommended trying an Apogee MIC and lent me one.

The Desktop

I started out with this project using my 2014 iMac 5k. It’s a pretty nicely specced out machine particularly for the time, a 4GHz 4-core i7 with 32GB RAM, and a 1TB SSD drive. About as good as it got back in 2014. I think it was the first year of the slimline iMacs. But for video production, there are a few bottlenecks with this machine. One is the editing and encoding, both of which take a long time with files in the tens of gigabytes size. 1TB isn’t much to work with either, once you get those large files, so you have to work across the network to a NAS of some kind, and then the 1Gbit/s network also gets in the way. I could alleviate that somewhat with a Sonnet 10 Gb ethernet interface for Thunderbolt 2, getting around 250-300 MB/sec. I guess you see where this is going…

The Notes

For many teaching subjects, and very much for math, you need to have the teacher write something by hand while the students watch. Like on good old-fashioned blackboards or whiteboards.

The Sound

We evolved quite a bit when it comes to the sound, as well. I do think, however, that we haven’t reached the end of this story, since I still have some unresolved problems, but compared to our beginnings, it’s a world of difference.

The Files

When you record a lot of material, the file storage quickly turns into a major problem. Consider that ScreenFlow, when recording from the computer screen, an iPad, and from the webcam², produces some 20-30 GB per hour of recording. The video camera additionally produces 20-25 GB per hour of recording at 1080p, 30 fps.

The Camera

We’ve gone through a succession of cameras to arrive at what we use now.