P4 Archive lets you easily archive your valuable video and production assets. Quickly locate your data in the archive by searching with keywords and previews. Increase your ability to repurpose your media and allow high availability of your footage. The reduced workload of both your servers and your staff increases productivity and efficiency and simplifies workflows. The software secures data on disk or tape and is available for Mac, Windows, Linux, and Solaris.

The integration with media asset management systems like Final Cut Server by Apple and CatDV by Squarebox provides a solution for tape storage. LTO tape is the most reliable and economic long-term media currently on the market. Moving completed productions from expensive online storage to cheaper off-line storage pays off. Cloning tapes for off-site storage also increases the level of your data security.

More information about the integration of P4 Archive with CatDV by Mike Szumlinski.

More information about André Aulichs integration of P4 Archive into Final Cut Server.

An integration with MXF allows users to natively open and access a broad range of MXF variations without converting or referencing to the QuickTime movie format. This enables Final Cut Studio, Final Cut Server and other solutions to work directly with native MXF media.

In addition to the default search parameters, you can add custom metadata to individualize your data storage. You can include categories such as time of day, lens or film location and thus locate and re-use your data more quickly and effectively.

P4 Archive can create low resolution previews and proxies for all common video and audio formats, using QuickTime. Since previews are stored on your primary storage, they are available anytime for browsing and searching. Preview capabilities can easily be extended for additional formats by using QuickTime components.

P4 Archive can create different login areas that ensure access to certain data for specified user groups. Different users can be granted access and restore rights only for “their” part of the archive. P4 uses a familiar “shopping cart” checkout scheme to allow users to restore their assets without IT (administrator) intervention.

In the days when working with videotapes was still en vogue, there used to be one tape for one production. After finalizing one project, the tape would be put into a physical archive. With P4 Archive you can also get one LTO tape per production. This makes for an easy transition to a digital archive.

Each manually started archive job can write on a new LTO tape. This results in higher security for your data, writes a lot faster and gives you the familiar one tape/one production ratio. Within P4, go to the Archive Plan and in the Archive Options, select “Use new media”. This works with LTO single drives as well as with a tape libraries.