A Brief History of Video Storage

As we launch our new ebook, Storing Video: The Ultimate Guide for TV, Film and Corporate Video Production Companies we thought it might be interesting to take a quick look through some of the video storage formats used in the past.

Analogue The history of capturing the moving image starts with still photography. By the mid-1800s, gelatin coated glass dry plates' had become the standard for photography but the hunt was on for a way of making film that was less fragile. Methods involving peeling the gelatin emulsion from paper and other flexible backings were tried but all proved unreliable, although they were used by early film pioneers.

Film By the late 1890s, several people, including George Eastman, had independently developed celluloid backed film. As the motion picture industry began to develop in the early 1900s celluloid nitrate film' became the industry standard. Despite its flammable nature, celluloid nitrate continued to be used until 1951 when it was discontinued and cellulose acetate, which had been used for home movie film for decades, took over.

Film is stored in cans in huge archives and film libraries which needed strictly controlled environments. If the film comes into too much contact with heat, moisture or acid, the chemical structure of the film begins to break down and the film would be destroyed.

Video tape In 1951, the first video tape recorder captured live images from television cameras by converting the information into electrical impulses and saving the information onto magnetic tape. Video recorders were sold for $50,000 in 1956, and videotapes cost $300 per one-hour reel. Tapes were 2 inches wide. The first video recorders to use cassettes (VCR) were sold by Sony in 1971.

Numerous formats of videotape were released for professional use, although as a home format it came down to a battle between Sony's Betamax and JVC's VHS with VHS eventually winning out. In the pro market though, the Betamax-derived Betacam format became the most popular format due to its better image quality.

Video tape has its limitations as a storage medium and while estimates vary, it's generally accepted that it has a shelf life of around 8-12 years before the quality begins to degrade badly.

Digital Laserdisc Although the first laserdisc patent was issued in 1961, it didn't appear on the US market until 1978 (just two years after the VHS video format was launched). Laserdiscs were the forerunner of CDs and DVDs, using bumps and flats that were read by a laser beam to represent binary sequences. Although it offered better picture quality than VCRs, the format never took off. Discs were large (30cm in diameter) and one side could only hold about an hour's worth of video meaning viewers had to turn the disc over when they watched a film.

For a brief period Laserdiscs were used in production for distributing dailies. Also some early computer editing systems used laserdiscs to access the footage (rather than downloading it to a hard drive).

DVD Following in the path of the laserdisc, DVDs were released in 1995. They work in the same way as CDs - data is stored as a sequence of bumps and pits in a continuous, spiralling data track on the disc and the bumps and pits are read by a laser beam. The changing reflections are interpreted as the binary data pattern which is converted to a video picture. Discs can be single or double sided and have up to two data tracks per side meaning they can store from 4.5GB up to 15.9GB of data on a single disc, the equivalent of 2 - 8 hours of video.

Hard drive The first hard drive was released by IBM in 1956. It used 50 24-inch discs to store 5MB of data. The first hard drive to have more than 1 GB in capacity was released by IBM in 1980. It could store 2.5 GB, was the size of a refrigerator and weighed 250 kg. The price when it was introduced ranged from $81,000 to $142,400. As way of comparison, the average cost per gigabyte of storage is now 3p.

Flash drives The successor to the floppy disk due to their easy portability and USB plug-n-play capability, flash drives first appeared in the late 90s. They are capable of storing anything up to 4GB of data (around 2 hours' worth of video) and are cheap and almost disposable.

SD cards SD cards also first appeared in the late 1990s and, in numerous variations such as MicroSD, became the standard for data storage in video cameras, cameras and mobile phones. Small and lightweight with big capacity.

XDCAM Discs Strictly speaking, XDCAM isn't actually a type of storage device, but instead is a recording format introduced by Sony in 2003. What people are actually referring to is called a Professional Disc. However as the sole pro-camera manufacturer to use Professional Discs, and only on their XDCAM camera range, they quickly became synonymous with the recording format, with many people combining the names and calling them XDCAM Discs.

Professional Discs (PFDs) are a type of optical disc, similar to that of a CD or DVD, however, by storing data more densely, they can achieve far greater storage capacities.

The cloud Cloud storage is an internet-based service where users can store data on a network of servers accessed online. The servers themselves are simply a type of hard drive, but among the benefits for the user are that they can access the data from any device with an internet connection and that they know their data is being backed up and secured by the cloud service provider. Services are scalable meaning users can use as much or as little storage as they need. Dont think youre using the cloud yet? Think again. Gmail, Facebook, Flickr and thousands of other companies you deal with every day (including Aframe!) utilise the cloud to provide their services.

Image credit: Kastians

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