Does anybody use tape any more?

I recently came across some VHS tapes in our studio. 200 or so T-160’s and some T-60’s. It made me think about when we ordered it. I checked and it was 3 years ago. We used to go through so much VHS tape (as a duplication house along with our production services) that our tape vendor would use a trucking company to make the deliveries. Now we use hardly any tape at all, and that is primarily for masters of videos we create.

Right now we are working on 3 different projects that will be delivered by You Tube upload. Another project is delivered on DVD’s with menus, and yet another will be deployed within an e-learning module.

We are actually considering retiring our last rack of 10 VHS recorders. I never thought the day would come, but it seems to be here. And as I think back to my years in New York editing audio tape with a razor blade, I’m not sure how I feel about this transformation. Yes it’s faster, and easier. Its great that our clients can have a final product within minutes of completion, wherever they are in the world. But on the same token, I’m sad to realize the old physical media era is over.

As I write this, I’m remember a job we did for a large food ingredient company earlier this year. The videos were for their global sales meeting which was held in Malta. For some reason, they felt that they may need to make some last minute changes to the videos during the tech rehearsal in Malta. We were alerted to this possibility beforehand, and we were ready. Guess what? They did need to do the changes, on a Saturday, the same day the videos were to be shown. Using our FTP server, and SKYPE, we got word of the changes, made them, and posted the new version on the FTP. The client downloaded it, and the screening was a huge hit.

With tape, this would not have been possible at any cost. These last minute changes cost our client less than a couple of international Fedex’s.

So its all good, but I still miss tape.