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Archiving in Smoke

    Archiving in Smoke 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.

    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.

    Filesystem Archive

    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.

    VTRs

    NoteSmoke only reads VTR archives.

    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:

    • Clips with a colour depth higher than 10-bit
    • Clips referencing media, either directly or through clip history, with a resolution that does not match that of the VTR

    You can use the following VTRs for archiving your material in Smoke:

    • Uncompressed SD VTRs such as D-1 or lightly compressed SD VTRs such as Digital Betacam
    • Uncompressed HD VTRs or lightly compressed HD VTRs such as Sony HDCAM SR or Panasonic HD D5
    • Compressed HD VTRs such as Sony HDCAM (using "HDCAM" rather than "VTR" as the archive device type)