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Solid State, Solid Safe

Okay, I hold my hands up high and admit that when Panasonic first released their P2 system I was one of the most vocal critics. I admit that, but I still stand by everything I said at the time. Today is different however. Solid State has come of age.

Camcorders now come in all different flavours, many of them recording to SDHC, an extremely cheap, reliable, and accessible solid state card. With the Sony EX series of cameras right up to the new PMW-350 you can record to SxS, Memory Stick, and now Sony have announced an official SDHC adaptor too.

None of the issues of the P2 system, and total flexibility as to how you can record. Need a new SD card in the field? Get one at the nearest home electrics store. They don't have SD cards in stock? Well get a Memory Stick instead. Solid State recording is now totally accessible, and the storage costs are not that far off tape.

And yet despite all the advances the politically correct way of talking about Solid State video recording is to treat it with kids gloves. As if cards and data need to be handled with forensic tweezers for fear of all that precious footage being lost.

Well I say bunk (I've always wanted to use that word). All Solid State recording cards are far more robust than most tapes. They don't risk getting chewed up. They don't suffer from humidity issues. They don't suffer from dropouts.

Oh but what about the horror stories we hear on all the forums about people losing their data? Well the answer to that is that no technology is infallable. In most cases the data loss was down to operator error.

But I don't want ANY risk of losing my data!! I hear you cry. Well, to that I say that you don't hear about all the people losing data on their tapes due to being chewed up, used in dusty or highly humid conditions etc. Why don't we hear about them? The reason is simple. Nobody is going to go onto an internet forum and say "My tape was chewed up by my deck, what can I do?" because everyone knows that when that happens the data is pretty much lost and that it is pretty much a fact of life with such a medium.

With solid state however, there is a reason to go on forums. Because unlike tape sometimes there is a workaround to find that lost footage.

Such errors are incredibly rare though. I would say that there are far less errors in my experience with solid state than tape. In fact in my own direct experience I have lost umpteen decent shots due to tape dropout in the same period of time when I used to use DV, butI have had absolutely no errors with Solid State on the Sony EX3, and still haven't.

Now we come to the idea of "data wrangling" the so called Jedi like job that has been invented to create all sorts of FUD. Now, for most shoots the cost of cards is cheap enough that you can record hour upon hour of footage without ever having to dump the footage to a laptop and reuse the card for new footage. That was the old way when P2 first arrived and you had to be a board member of BAE Systems to be able to afford a new card.

The other politically correct point many people submit to is the idea that if you are shooting in some far off remote place you should use tape. The idea being that tape is easy to get hold of. Really? The sentence I hear a lot begins with "When I was in the Amazon..." or "When I was in Sierra Leone..."

Okay, so you are in the Amazon and run out of tape, what do you do? I've looked on the local branch directory for both Dixons and Walmart and it appears that they don't have any stores in the Amazon jungle. So, what do you do? Do you transfer your data in realtime to a prepared laptop and reuse the tape? Gasp!!

Speaking of which, how do you propose that this tape thing is so safe in such an environment? Any backup you make in the field has to be made either into a laptop, in realtime, or to a tape deck, in realtime. And that backup tape will be susceptible to all of the issues that your original tape was. Dropouts, humidity etc.

Yet even though you could take multiple stores of solid state cards that would take up much less space than tapes. And even though you could take devices such as the Nexto DI which can backup 60 mins of SxS footage in only a few minutes. And even though you could make MULTIPLE, yes MULTIPLE backups of your precious footage in half the time it would take you do wait around for a clunky old tape to transfer, solid state always seems to fall off the radar when people talk about shooting in remote locations!

Lets face a simple fact. Tape is not as reliable as solid state. It isn't as reliable as XDCAM disc. With all the options available the only use for tape is when it has DLT in the title. And even then you have to store it correctly and verify it periodically. Something that could be done much more quickly if you used multiple solid state backups instead.

Quite frankly there isn't any storage medium in the world that doesn't need periodic checking and secondary backup. So I have no idea why an urban myth has built up that Solid State requires hoops to be jumped through. Maybe it does, but only if you have old school thought and are not using the latest methods available to you.

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