A colleague told me how being able to store 40 gigabytes of data on a single medium helped save a large project.   He was asked, last minute, to bring the screener for a movie to a movie theater for a preview.  The movie was digitized, and was designed to be projected using a digital projector that read the data and projected it, at film quality resolutions, onto the movie screen.

He drove his backup copy of the movie from San Diego to Santa Barbara, a drive that takes four to five hours.  Meanwhile, at the theater, the coordinators of the preview were in a panic.  The hard drive that stored the movie had crashed.  They weren’t able to bring it back, and may have to cancel the special screening.

They hadn’t figured on my colleague.  He arrived an hour or so before the screening was scheduled to be projected.  The data on my colleague’s Blu-ray disk contained the entire film, in a format that contained more data than a typical Blu-ray movie.  Although the projector wasn’t able to read the data on the Blu-ray disc he brought, using the notebook computer and an external Blu-ray drive that he brought with him, he was able to transfer the data from the Blu-ray disc onto the projector’s hard drive, and the projector was able to take that data and project the film.

The audience had no idea of the travails that the producers had felt just a short time before showtime.  The screening ran without a hitch.   And it would have been disastrous without that Blu-ray data disc, with the entire film recorded onto it.

A few interesting notes:  Had the film been recorded so that it was cut into two or more pieces (for example, if they had tried to record the film onto a stack of DVDs), it may have been very difficult to seamlessly stitch each piece of the film together in high enough quality to be able to show the entire film, without interruptions or breaks between discs.   Having the ability to record up to 50 GB now (and as much as 125 GB in the near future) onto a single piece of media enabled the recording of a single, very large file, unbroken, onto the medium.   Using the recordable Blu-ray Disc as if it was just another Blu-ray video wouldn’t have worked – the film quality video required even more data than High Def provides.

Although the film probably could have been copied onto a 64 gigabyte Flash drive (costing somewhere around $100), by comparison, a relatively cheap recordable 50 GB disc empowered my colleague, enabling him to less expensively record and transport a new copy of the film.  The benefits enjoyed by being able to transfer very large data files can easily be applied to IT and the Enterprise, who frequently has to back up, store, or transport very large data, e-mail, or other files.  Blu-ray is an excellent medium for data storage and transport.  It’s smaller and lighter than external hard drives, it’s less expensive per gigabyte than similar sized flash drives, and it can be read by pretty much any computer in which a Blu-ray drive is installed, or to which an external Blu-ray drive is attached.