Has storage caught up with new trends in camera resolution?

Camera technology seems to be moving at rollercoaster pace as we discovered at NAB this year with several 4K offerings from manufacturers, and an under US $3000 cinema camera from Blackmagic Design that was thought to be the star of the show. The question is, has the rest of the chain caught up and if it hasn’t, what does that spell for end users?

I inadvertently wiped the smile off a DoP’s face recently when I asked him what his storage options were when he proudly showed me his brand new 4K RAW footage.

As a production house, clearly, these are the people who shoot the most, whether they are documentaries, corporate videos or TVCs, and uncompressed 4K footage can be very demanding in terms of storage. We began to explore different options together.

When I asked about the cloud, he chuckled.

“In this part of the world?” he asked.

“We have just come back from a two-day shoot with more than 2TB of data. And that’s just a two-day shoot. Now imagine placing all the data we have on a remote server. How would we access it when we needed it and how long do you think it would take to download that when we struggle to upload or download just 1Gb of data on an average day?”

We agreed that perhaps his only cost-effective option at present was LTO tapes.

A broadcaster placed the bandwidth issue in perspective.

“We pay the local telco AED 22,000 (US $6000) to deliver a synchronous Ethernet speed of 20mb, which means we can download or upload at 20mbps. That is a little more than AED 1,000 per 1mbps so you can imagine how expensive the cloud option could be,” he pointed out.

Having mulled over the paucity of cost-effective storage options, we plan to explore this in greater depth with both end users and manufacturers in the coming months so that media companies in the region can make more informed choices.