Archiving in Flame Premium consists of writing your media and project setups to external storage devices or to filesystem, to store your projects offline but in a restorable format.
A project archive includes all of a project's Media panel content, including the Media library, Shared Libraries, the Desktop, as well as all of a project's workspaces.
You can also archive individual clips from the Media panel, and the project setups.
Archives created in Creative Finishing applications are read-only in Smoke Desktop Subscription. That is, you can restore an archive in Smoke Desktop Subscription, but you cannot add material to it.
You cannot restore a Smoke Desktop Subscription archive in Flame or the Flame Premium suite of applications.
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 Premium can read and write filesystem archives. If your application is running on a Linux workstation, it can also read and create tape archives.
While Flame Premium can read VTR archives created in a previous version, it cannot create nor write to one.
A filesystem archive is an archive stored on a hard disk drive, such as external USB/FireWire® (IEEE 1394) hard drives offers, or shared storage such as a SAN. The device can use any of the formats supported by your workstation, but the recommended ones are ext2, ext3, or xfs for Linux, and HFS+ for OS X. NTFS is not supported.
Using a filesystem to archive your material provides the quickest method of archiving and restoring your material, which can be of any bit depth or resolution.
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. Tape archives can be of any bit depth or resolution.
However, tape archives can only be restored to a Flame Premium workstation and are unreadable by other applications. The procedure of archiving to a tape device is similar to archiving to file.
Flame Premium only supports tape devices 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.
Flame cannot create or write to a VTR archive. It can restore a VTR archive created in a previous version.
The following are VTR that were used to create VTR archives and which can be used to restore them: