Saved By The MiniDV

Earlier this week, the outdated yet resilient technology known as MiniDV tape nearly saved my ass.

I work part-time as a filmmaking instructor at a private school. We haven't gone completely tapeless yet (working on it!) and throughout the school year I'll pick up some extra work making promo videos or filming live performances such as school plays on our Panasonic DVXs (one of the best built DV cameras - period).

One of the performances I recorded last year was of The Laramie Project, a powerful play that resonates as much today as it did when it was first published. The kids did a great job. They even held a discussion about the issues the play explores after each performance. I commend the school for allowing this to happen. Trust me - some private schools, including some in our system, wouldn't go near this material.

Anyway, between the two cameras we shot six MiniDV tapes' worth of the Laramie performance, three tapes per camera. I used six of our computers to capture (remember Log and Capture?) all these tapes at once so I wasn't capturing them one by one (remember when you had to factor capture time into your workflow?). Once that process was complete, I moved the newly made quicktime files onto an external drive, I synced the cameras together in Final Cut Pro 7, and intended on taking the drive home and editing the program for a DVD.

But I neglected that last part for about six months.

Spring cleaning

At the end of the school year we clear a lot of media from our computers. No one had brought up the Laramie DVDs since I captured the footage, so when I saw the quicktimes on the hard drive I assumed we didn't really need to make the DVD anymore. 

I must have deleted the footage in early May.

At the end of May, with seniors who had performed in the play graduating, there was renewed interest in a DVD. Forgetting what I had done only a few weeks prior, I said, "Sure, no problem, I can whip that right up."

Yesterday, I picked up the hard drive intending to finish what I had started only to discover the footage was gone. I had broken a cardinal rule of mine: Always triple-check that you don't need this or that footage before you delete it.

I panicked. I did not look forward to telling the theater teacher there would be no Laramie DVD. I cursed and kicked things (alone in the class room, of course) and yelled at my past self. I'm juggling several projects right now. The last thing I need is the stress caused by such a careless oversight. I paced around the classroom hoping that a solution would present itself.

And it did.

Sitting on a bookshelf, stacked in neat order, I found the original MiniDV tapes. As though Past Me had whispered to himself, "Just in case..."

It's a painful format to work with, but at least it's REAL

Re-discovering the MiniDV tapes made me think about if we had recorded our projects on memory cards and we had only backed it up to one drive (then erased the footage off the cards), recovering that footage would have been impossible and I would have disappointed a colleague and several of our students.

This happened the same week the new Macbook Pros were announced. To hell with the Superdrive - no one burns DVDs anymore! At least, Apple would like you to stop burning DVDs.

On the other end of the media spectrum I picked up LTO tape backups for a feature film I am post supervising. This footage was shot on the Arri Alexa and while we have it backed up across three 4TB external drives, making LTO backups created a physical backup that, in theory, will last us thirty years. You know - for the eventual director's super-duper cut in 2042. They are sitting on a shelf in a bag in my closet, waiting for the day they can come to the rescue the way the MiniDV tapes did for me.

This is not a post meant to lament change - change is good, it's necessary, and it's a part of life. But I couldn't help but think of a few of the virtues of physical media. Physical media would have saved me in this instance in a way that virtual media might not have. The experience just made me very aware of the transition we're in the middle of, and how it can it be a good thing that it takes a while for old technology to die out. Just yesterday I spent the better part of my day creating DVDs of my short film for festival submissions (won't be as easy, in the future, whenever I upgrade my Macbook Pro). That after also submitting digitally via the Without A Box online screener - one foot in one world, one foot in the other.

Look, I haven't come to any compelling conclusions or insight. This is more of a think piece. The media-destruction-scare followed by the MiniDV-save just got me thinking about Virtual and Physical media. We're at an interesting pivot point in technology where physical boundaries are being eroded.
Someday we may keep high end, data intensive (like uncompressed 8 bit video) media online that takes up tons of drive space. Will it become so routine that we catalogue video the way we catalogue emails? (Google and wevideo have already teamed up to offer online, collaborative video editing - has anyone used this?) Imagine trying to search for video of a family member in your Video Inbox without remembering exactly how you catalogued it. Will it be a quick find? Or take just as long as if you had left a tape in an archive bin in your office closet?

We're building a new world in the Cloud, day by day. But clouds have no ground for you to stand on. And one day I'll lose some footage again, look for my trusty MiniDV - low resolution and all - and it won't be there to come to my rescue.