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Ugh. I would say bring back the days of tape but the storage space would be mad. I remember the faff with retrieving tapes - in fact.... here we go. Throwback to one of my early forum posts:
https://www.lfgss.com/conversations/155007/
So many of those tapes just ended up slowly moulding in a basement. Probably spent 30+ million quid on acquiring all that footage over the years in the value of cost per package. I remember digitising a few of the rare tapes to shove on Getty at some stage. Still have the AVIs somewhere.
CYOA-
LTO is a very different best to the analogue days but I completely understand the reservations. There's basically a few things you have to consider, like, how much data will you be producing, how often have you had to access footage from long dead projects, can you bill clients for storing it etc. Nearly all of the post houses and agencies I've worked with pay for storage of drives and LTO's off site but they're usually dealing with hundreds if not thousands of terabytes every year. It's a massive ballache and definitely not a job I'd want.
Gewürzt
LTO is a faff and needs dedicated workflow and management but it's the only true long term storage option for video.