Archiving in Flame Assist

Archiving in Flame Assist 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.

Important Compatibility Information

The Flame family of products (Flame, Flare, Flame Assist) can read contents created in Smoke Desktop Subscription (DTS), with the following limitations:
Will import in...
Flame Flare Flame Assist Smoke DTS Training Edition
Projects Created In... Flame 2017 or later Yes Yes Yes No No
Flare 2017 or later Yes Yes Yes No No
Flame Assist 2017 or later Yes Yes Yes No No
Smoke DTS 2017 or later Yes Yes Yes Yes No
Training 2017 or later No No No No Yes
Flame 2016 Yes Yes Yes No No
Smoke DTS 2016 Yes Yes Yes Yes No
Training 2016 No No No No Yes
Smoke DTS 2015 Yes Yes Yes No No

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 Assist 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 Assist can read VTR archives created in a previous version, it cannot create nor write to one.

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 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.

Tape Archives

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 Assist workstation and are unreadable by other applications. The procedure of archiving to a tape device is similar to archiving to file.

Flame Assist only supports tape devices which the vendor confirms that:

The initialization file (init.cfg) for your Flame Assist 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.

VTR Archives

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: