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04 February 2010
The Case of the Disappearing Technology
Having authored several commercial instructional DVDs, I view the ability to master DVDs for replication as a basic requirement of my business. Therefore, when a client asked if I could do that for him, my answer was “of course.”
The last time I submitted a DVD to a replicator, several years ago, everyone required a DLT master. A few replicators would work off of a DVD for simple projects, but copy protection features like CSS and Macrovision definitely required a DLT.
DLT, which stands for “digital linear tape,” is a magnetic tape data storage technology owned by Quantum. DLT machines were originally used by IT departments to provide network backups in an era when hard drives were limited in size and still quite expensive. DLT machines communicated with computers through SCSI connections, which used to be the gold standard of intelligent data communications. The DLT IV tape, introduced in 1994, held up to 20GB. During that period, the DLT IV tape became the standard for delivering DVD video masters to replicators -- plenty of room for the additional instructions required by the replicator but which were not needed on the final commercial DVD.
Today, DLT machines are fading faster than tape-based video cameras. Even SCSI is disappearing, having been replaced in consumer devices by firewire and USB years ago. SCSI is now only used with RAID storage arrays, but even there seems to be losing the battle to Fibre channel.
I checked with a number of DVD replicator web sites and found they still pretty much universally requested DVD masters on DLT IV tape. An active eBay community still seemed determined to provide this capability to independents like myself. I had kept my trusty Quantum 4000 DLT machine, manufactured in 2001, and DVD Studio Pro continued to offer the option to record to DLT, so recording capability was not a problem. Finding a SCSI card that would fit in one of my Mac Pros and communicate with my my old, slow DLT machine was not so simple. I quickly discovered that SCSI devices, connectors, data rates, software, etc. all had changed dramatically in the past several years. After hours of research, I ordered a SCSI card. As soon as I took it out of the box, however, it was obvious it wasn’t going to work. More research and I found a disturbing support document on Apple’s web site that warned, “If you attempt to format a DLT drive on a Mac Pro, the write may not be successful..." I called Apple support -- the rep I talked to had no idea whether the support document was still accurate, but confirmed my suspicions that with machines changing as fast as they are and this device already being older, it wasn't going to be reliable long-term, even if I could find a card that worked with both the drive and my computer.
If DLTs had become dinosaurs to the rest of the world, how was it that our industry remained married to this out-of-date technology? Or was there a hidden secret?
More reading and I kept running into statements like, "Any project requiring CSS or Macrovision copy protection must be authored as such and must be submitted on DLT or DDP on disc. All DLT masters must include DDP files."
To make a long story short, DDP stands for Disc Description Protocol, and there are versions 2.1 and 3.0. There is another competing “industry-standard” format, CMF (Cutting Master Format). DVD Studio Pro allows one to set up a project for CSS and/or Macrovision copy protection, use a DDP or CMF output option and write the files to a hard drive instead of a DLT tape. These data files can then be copied to a DVD disc or hard drive for replication. (Apparently, DVD Studio Pro is one of the few, possibly only, programs with this capability.) I carefully read the detailed technical instructions on the replicator web site, copied the files to a “Layer 0” folder on a DVD-R disc according to their instructions, and the job went through without a hitch.
Toward the end of this process, I put a note out on iForum to find out what people were actually doing. The answer was much different than the quick “submit on DLT” found on most web sites. The first to respond said “we always use them” and offered to produce a DLT for me at her cost. The second, Rona Fitzgerald of ColorNet Disc, checked with her tech department and learned that hardly anyone was actually using DLTs any more. A third, a long-time friend Jim Loyd from Mediaworks International in Nashville, confirmed that almost everyone is writing data files to DVDs these days.
Having gone through this experience, I’m amazed that this information was so difficult to find and so few professionals in the field seemed to know about it. Technology changes quickly, and the willingness to dig and challenge can make a big difference in the services you can offer, as well as your costs.
