Tuesday- Creative Storage Conference@NAB

Tuesday- Creative Storage Conference@NAB

Las Vegas for me is a multi-level treat.  My only gambling is driving a rental car on the city streets and hoping I don't run into traffic or get hit by a drunk.  What I do like is enjoying the food from the mirror restaurants of the many international celebrity chefs.  Last night however, we went off-strip a few blocks to La Scala for one of the best Italian meals I have enjoyed-- including Boston's North End.

Time to enjoy the other level of the LV treat and attend NAB.  Another day, another blog.  I have speaking gig this morning at the Creative Storage Conference, so I spent the night tossing and turning.  Poor wife, she was happy to see me take off at 7:00am to get to the early 7:30am start of the conference so she could get back to sleep.  I will be spending the day here in room N119-- a part of The LVCC I did not even know exists.

My presentation was within the session dealing with the impact upon storage of new developments in content capture.  More on my topic latter.  What I found interesting were two other presentations from LaCIE and Sony.  Both made the point that there is no one right storage media.  Comparisons were made between tape, hard drives, optical media, and solid-state.  In selecting the right media for the right application you need to consider performance, cost, size, and durability among other factors.  In the performance category we have long list with the top parameters being transfer rates, latency, and archival life.  A high level summary is that solid-state wins for durability and size but is too expensive to be used for archival storage.  Tape today is very cheap and best for dead storage with very long archival life.  Hard drives great for editing and supporting real time active asset management.  Finally optical media are a great compromise of long life and fast non-linear access.

You can find my Creative Storage presentation on my personal website by Wednesday morning at http://www.ipaction.com .  The short version is that as if the storage needs in a camcorder due to SD to HD was not enought, I am suggesting there are emerging applications that can increase the storage needs by N times more where N can run from 2X to over 20X.  Examples of the applications are capturing multiple time sync'ed videos at: 1) Multiple focal planes to increase depth of field, 2) Multiple angles to increase field of view, 3) Multi exposure settings to increase dynamic range, 4) Multiple sensors to support 3D and interactive VR, and 5) Multi-spectral (i.e. visible and I/R) to support more information.  I used a gallery of still photos to illustrate the benefits of each application.

Back from lunch now and back to the Creative Storage conference for the afternoon sessions.

Stu