There are lots of benefits to solid state media! First is the overall convenience. As a working professional, I’m always looking to save a minute or two here or there in my daily tasks. Not having to play through a tape while my machine is digitizing is a huge time saver.
Another benefit is cost. I have in my 13 years of professional video production, shot countless tapes that ended up with the odd 5-10 minute clips on them or even left 5-10 minutes of space at the end of a reel. The costs of the cards can be considerable, but for most newer media types SxS, Compact Flash or HDSC/XDSC they are relatively negligible. They can be dumped off to inexpensive hard drives set up in whatever redundant RAID you prefer for cheap. That way you get secure backups (that you don’t even have to redidgitize!) and cheap, re-useable media.
It’s also not exactly like our old tape decks were the most reliable things ever! I remember the sound that the old BVW-75 made as it decided that it demanded a sacrifice of this particular tape… usually followed by soft weeping of the producer. Dropouts, are still a major issue with HDV tape & the first time you have to wire in a outboard TBC/capture card to digitize over a phantom dropout you’ll really start wondering if it’s all worth it!
Solid state doesn’t have many of these issues, but does present a few of its own. Data wrangling on set is something that demands much, and detailed attention, usually even requiring another set of hands. The afore mentioned crashed card is a possibility, as well as losing a hard drive before being able to get your data backed up to long term storage (I don’t think it’s real practical to be bringing a big old RAID on shoots).
Personally I think the benefits outweigh the risks & I won’t be buying another tape based camera if I can help it. What do you think? Is tape dead?
