Archiving in Flame Premium saves your media and project setups on external storage devices or in a filesystem. This frees up space for new projects. It is also a convenient way to store your projects offline in a fully restorable form.
A project archive includes all of a project's Media panel content, including the Media library, Batch and Desktop snapshots, as well as all of a project's workspaces.
Or you can archive individual clips from the Media panel.
Choosing a Medium for Archiving
Choosing a medium or device for your archiving needs largely depends on your technical resources and overall needs. There are certain advantages and disadvantages to using each medium/device.
Flame can read and write archives from the following devices: file systems, VTRs, and tape drives.
Smoke can read and write archives from filesystems. While Smoke can read VTR archives, it cannot write to them.
A filesystem archive is an archive stored on a hard disk drive, such as external USB/FireWire® (IEEE 1394) hard drives offers, or networked storage such as a SAN. The device can use any of the formats supported by your workstation, usually ext2 or ext3 for Linux, and HFS+ for Mac. NTFS is not supported.
Using a filesystem to archive your material provides the quickest method of archiving and restoring your material, and offers full support for mixed-resolution projects.
A tape archive is an archive written directly to a device such as an LTO tape device. Tape provides fast and reliable read and write performance. And, contrary to VTR archives, tape archives can be of any bit depth.
However, data archives (tape archives) can only be restored to a Flame Premium workstation and are unreadable by other applications. Also, magnetic tape is a delicate media and is greatly affected by environmental conditions that cause its deterioration. The procedure of archiving to a tape device is similar to archiving to file.
Flame Premium only supports fibre channel tape devices connected to ports 1 or 4 of a four-port fibre channel adapter, and which the vendor confirms that:
The initialization file (init.cfg) for your Flame Premium contains examples of the ClipMgtDevice Tape keyword to help you set up the appropriate block size value for your tape device and define a text label to identify the device in the Archiving module. Please refer to the documentation from your archiving device vendor for guidelines on the actual block size to use.
You can use a VTR to archive your material. However, they do have limitations. As a long-term archiving medium, VTR tapes are subject to physical deterioration and format obsolescence. Also, the following clips cannot be archived to a VTR:
You can use the following VTRs for archiving your material in Flame Premium:
