Posted by nobody special on 12/22/06 22:05

You guys don't like MPEG2 (shrugs). There is "good" and there is "good
enough". Heck, that's been microsoft's modus operandi for decades;-) My
philosophy is you make a trade-off between quality and cost andm that
mix is different for every person.

Just a quick back of the napkin calculation, assuming 20-minute umatic
cassette tape loads, you're looking at over 3,300 hours of material.
Assuming a 40-hour workweek and not figuring in time to load, unload,
rewind, clean heads, potty breaks, lunch, holidays, etc, I make it
something over two years to get all this transferred by one person on a
full-time basis. Of course, if you're in a hurry, you could hire more
staff and gear working in parallel. Umatic decks and spares are
getting harder to find. I am really curious as to what the program
material is you're working to archive, and whether it's value justifies
the expense of the transfer operation. 3,300 hours is a hell of a lot
of hard drive storage any way you want to slice it, too. Lose one drive
in an array that doesn't have redundancy, you've lost all the episodes
on that drive. So what, you mirror the drives? To 6,600 hours of
storage? What the heck are these programs? Maybe the first step is to
cull what really needs and deserves to be archived from the rest?
Interesting article in the latest WIRED magazine on how NASA lost the
best live footage of Armstrong's moon landing, covers many of the same
themes.

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