Did I just buy my last spindle of DVDs?

I've been on DVD-Autopilot for the last ten years. Shoot a job? Back it up on two DVDs. Deliver a job? Send it on a DVD. Seems like a workflow that became a routine that became a habit. Now, don't jump in and tell me I should be backing up everything onto successive hard drives because I've been doing that too. In fact, I have a large filing cabinet drawer filled with carefully labeled external hard drive filled with stuff I probably don't need and never want to see again. But every quarter I hire an assistant to come in, plug each drive into an older computer station and spin em up. Just to check em. We run disk repair on them for good measure, let them spin down and put them back into the drawer. Costs me a couple hundred bucks but it keeps the freelance anxiety at bay. Or at least on a leash. 

Lately, when client insist on "owning all rights" we make them sign a waiver informing them that once they receive the materials we have no obligation to archive the images or make any sort of replacement of the images for any reason after the first 30 days. We STRONGLY encourage them to participate in a good back-up strategy. With implied ownership comes a new layer of responsibility for them. 

So----I've been in the DVD habit for a decade and in the last year all jobs were actually delivered using alternate methods. We sent a lot of single, retouched head shots and hero advertising shots to various clients with on line services such as DropBox (Thank you Samsung for giving me two years of 50 gigabytes of free space!!!). That's worked out well and clients like the delivery system. They tend to want to keep stuff up on Dropbox so they can use it as a defacto storage platform but we send them a notice, give them a time window and then relentlessly sweep out the folders. 

For bigger jobs, especially those under 16 gigabytes of finished files we use thumb drives/memory sticks/usb flash memory (call it whatever you like). We load up the images on the stick and hand it off or send it to the client via USPS Express Mail or similar service. Takes longer but that's really a lot of material to get through some company firewalls done over the web....

For really big jobs that exceed 32 gigabytes we bite the bullet, grab a portable, USB powered hard drive and write out the job to that. The drive is handed to or shipped to the client and we generally don't ask for the drives back. Although some make their way back to us when a client does another job. They usually bring the HD along with them and ask us to add the files to it. 

So why am I still burning these damned disk? I'm guessing this is my last spindle. I need to research the state of HD reliability and move to a series of ever bigger RAID arrays. Not happy about it because I have the prejudice that optical media is more robust than magnetic media but I'm ready to be proven wrong. 

The biggest driver for change? HD Video and the looming memory black hole that is 4K video. We need to back it up. We need to move it and we need to share it. And very few projects I've done, even the 30 second spots in an editable state will fit on the meager pastures of the DVD ranch. 

Funny how changes in technology relentlessly push changes in storage. I guess I've been lucky to have lasted in the "old school" paradigm of DVDs for this long. 

Quick data point for those who are interested. I've been randomly pulling out and checking CDs and DVDs from as far back (CDs) as 1996 and I have yet to come across an unreadable or corrupted disk. Many of our CDs and DVDs were burned onto various maker's "Gold Disks" (Kodak, etc.) and while I don't image that they will last forever some of them are coming close to 20 years of service. We keep them sleeved, in the dark and in temperature controlled environments. Fingers crossed we'll last until someone comes out with indestructible storage and I'll hire that assistant to come back in and spend a month transferring.....oh boy! That will be fun.

Don't care how but you really should be backing the good stuff up. All the crap you shoot? Just stick it in the cloud....everyone else does.

Forced to buy the RX 10 because the R1 was so darn good. Sony inertia.

As many of you may know I recently picked up a Sony RX10 which is kind of an all-in-one camera with a one inch sensor and a very good Zeiss 24-200mm equivalent lens. This is not my first Sony all-in-one camera. That honor goes to the remarkable Sony R1. The R1 was the first fixed zoom lens camera with an APS-C lens. It used a sensor from the same family of sensors that was used in the Nikon D2X around the same time period. The lens was also designed by Zeiss and matched precisely to the sensor. Just like the RX10 the R1 sported an electronic viewfinder, although it was primitive by comparison.  

I liked the camera a lot. Enough to purchase two of them and press them into many, many commercial projects. The images from this project date back to 2007 and were photographed for a capabilities (print) brochure for a national financial services company with a branch here in Austin, Texas. We made a lot of images during the course of a long day. I ran across a back up DVD this afternoon and wanted to try it in my main computer to spot check and see if we are starting to have an corruption issues with data stored on older, Kodak Gold DVDs. 

Once I started scrolling through the files one thing led to another and I decided that I wanted to see if Adobe had made any improvements to the lens profiles and camera profiles in the latest revs of PhotoShop. I was happy to find that there was a complete profile for the R1+lenses that included updates for vignetting, chromatic aberrations and lens geometry. One click gets you a very clean and rectilinear file, whether you shot it raw or in Jpeg.

While the R1 is only a ten megapixel camera it does wide angle well and when used at its native ISO of 160 it makes nice files. Compared to the current Sony RX10 you can see some difference in the progress of noise reduction even at both cameras' base ISOs. The R1 has more, and more obvious color noise in the shadow areas. Noticeable at 100% but negligible at almost anything you'd do on the screen. On the other hand the files have rich colors straight out of the camera. 

On this project we worked all day in mixed lighting and I thought the Sony did a great job sorting out color shifts and making good AWB selections. But whenever I had doubts I'd pull out a white target and do a custom white balance.  The camera does not have image stabilization but it is an early example of mirror less and has a leaf shutter so there's no shutter shock and there's no real noise or vibration. I tend to shoot on a tripod. Go figure, I own five or six photo tripods and two different video tripods with fluid heads...

I doubt I would have jumped into purchasing the RX10 if I had not first worked with the R1 for nearly nine years. I trust that Sony has the sensor tweaked as well as it can be and I know I can claw out a lot of detail in the dark areas. I trust that Zeiss wouldn't allow their brand to be plastered on a lens if it didn't perform. I'm in the early days so far with the RX10 but I think it's the descendent of the R1 and I hope I get five or ten years of good photography out of it as well. It's all in the family.