I stopped by the G-Tech booth, where Matt Bennion showed me their latest update to the EV Series G-Speed Shuttle XL.

Data archiving is not something most of us want to think about, but it's a reality that all filmmakers have to face today. The demand for lower compression and higher resolution material is increasing, meaning that we all eat through hard drives much faster. On the bright side, archiving is getting easier and more affordable all the time. The LTO tape format has become the standard for data archiving in our business, and the new LTFS (Linear Tape File System) makes it easy to use. One downside of an LTO deck setup is that it is usually tied to a full computer workstation. That's where mLogic's mTape comes in.

Sony is known for their reliable and proven Optical Disc technology. Many of us have countless numbers of their XDCAM discs on our shelves serving as an archive, just like we used to do with tape stock. Sony has recognized the need to archive material in a larger format with the same reliability (up to 50 years based on testing), so they built an Optical Disc Cartridge, which combines 12 discs into one container, sort of like a car CD changer. Cartridges come in sizes up to 1.5 TB, in either write-one or re-writable formats.

4K was the definitive buzzword at NAB this year, as well as CES, with a number of manufacturers releasing 4K televisions, 4K game systems, and 4K cameras. With the consumer demand for 4K content just around the corner, one of the most often asked questions is "How much is this gonna cost us?!"

AbelCine offers scalable software and hardware to manage your digital assets effectively and affordably. These systems have been chosen because they work well together and offer simple, straightforward solutions that can leverage your existing resources rather than over-complicate your workflow.

Many productions today consider the archiving of acquisition media something to be dealt with after completion of the work. Other projects consider the backing up of original data onto additional hard drives as their archive. These, however, do not utilize the organizational and long-term advantages of a proper archival system.

It occurred to us when creating the Camera Mounted Recorders comparison chart that there is often confusion around different HD formats. In 2009, I wrote up a blog titled Making Sense of HD Formats that covered the different HD formats used today. But what I didn't go into was those other words and numbers that we often see associated with a video compression format: bit rate and bit depth.