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Sony Tape Shortage


John Sprung

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I just saw a story on this last night on the local news (Toronto). It said boxes of HDCAM SR tapes are selling on ebay for as much as $6000 usd with some people expecting the prices to quickly rise to upwards of $12000 usd. Sony is asking people to refrain from hoarding tape stock but you have to wonder why broadcasters, etc wouldn't start doing just that. Solid State anyone?

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Ordinarily, SR 64's were about $150 each. We've found some at $180, and should be OK for a while. If that's $12K for a box of ten, it would be $1200 each. I don't think that's realistically gonna happen. We're going file based a lot more, and the networks are falling back on D5 and original version HDCam for delivery. We can bounce older stuff over to LTO's, and re-use the SR if we have to, but that hasn't been necessary yet. For the Sony cameras that use the SR 40's, as you say, you could just hang a Nanoflash on it and be good to go. Back the cards up to LTO, and treat that as your original.

 

 

 

 

-- J.S.

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Have we now decided that Nanoflash is as good as HDCAM-SR?

 

If that is the case, wow, there's a lot of money's worth of useless SR gear in the world!

 

But then, until they manage to start manufacturing tape again, that's the default outcome anyway.

 

P

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I just saw a story on this last night on the local news (Toronto). It said boxes of HDCAM SR tapes are selling on ebay for as much as $6000 usd with some people expecting the prices to quickly rise to upwards of $12000 usd. Sony is asking people to refrain from hoarding tape stock but you have to wonder why broadcasters, etc wouldn't start doing just that. Solid State anyone?

 

Wow might be some truth to this, here's an auction for 10 94s for $4, 900.00. That's $490.00 a tape, ouch.

 

http://cgi.ebay.com/Sony-HDCAM-SR-94-minute-BCT-94SRL-10-Brand-New-tapes-/320676032184?pt=US_Camcorder_Tapes_Discs&hash=item4aa9c7eeb8#ht_1011wt_812

 

I have a huge stack of 94s, used of course, one pass. But hey.....

 

R,

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Have we now decided that Nanoflash is as good as HDCAM-SR?

 

If that is the case, wow, there's a lot of money's worth of useless SR gear in the world!

 

But then, until they manage to start manufacturing tape again, that's the default outcome anyway.

 

P

 

The big limitation on the Nanoflash is that it's only 8 bits. You can't go as far in color grading with that, but some of our DP's were using it for convenience even before the earthquake. A 10 bit upgrade is in the works. It's also only 4:2:2, primarily a problem for green screens. Clearly not as good, but any port in a storm....

 

Yes, I'd hate to be selling an SR deck today.

 

 

 

 

 

-- J.S.

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