What's new

About ITS

Products

Services

Partners

Contacts

Home

Summary

• Runs on PC hardware under DOS or Windows
• Supports many industry standard (SEGY, SEGA, SEGB, SEGC, SEGD) and proprietary seismic tape formats (Phoenix, Western Code and more).
• Reformatting of proprietary trace-sequential data to SEG-Y.
• Works with different controller boards for PERTEC, StorageTek and SCSI interface drives.
• Support for all regular media types: 4mm, 8mm, 3480/90, 9-track, DLT.
• Summarized reports for efficient administration and QC of large transcription large transcription jobs.
• Highly versatile to help deal with many data transcription problems.
• Advanced scripting facilities for automation of complex and repetitive tasks.
• Data analysis function for advanced Quality Control checks.
• Up to three simultaneous copies of the same input.
• Screen wiggle trace plotting and hard copy output.
• Application in seismic data transcription companies, processing centers and oil companies.

Introduction

Tpcopy was developed for the execution of the complete tape library conversion of Lagoven, S.A., one of the three Petroleos de Venezuela, S.A. operating companies, a 4 year project,which will be finished in December 1996. During the execution of this project a great many productivity enhancement and quality control features were added to tpcopy.

The result is an extremely flexible copying program with solutions for all challenges one encounters in the copying and reformatting of the many different types of tapes that exist in the petroleum industry.

Copying

Tpcopy can copy any type of tape with adequate reporting, as long as it is readable on the drives it supports. Period. For trace sequential seismic data (SEGY and SEGD80xx), however, many reporting, editing and selection options exist:

• Detailed and summary reports
• Editing EBCDIC, binary and trace headers
• Trace selection (2D): Only copying traces that pertain to a certain range of shotpoints, field files, or CDPs.
• Sub-setting (3D): Only copying traces pertaining to a specified polygon, either in (x,y), (lat,long) or (IL,XL) coordinates.
• Reformatting of proprietary, non-SEGY trace sequential formats to SEGY: 2 byte and 4 byte Western Code, Phoenix and Digicon. There is a generalized tool for other formats with 8, 12, 16, or 32 bit integers.

Tpcopy can copy large record field tapes. Generally speaking, only 9 track tape drives support records over 500 kbytes. For output drives such as Exabytes and most 3480 drives that do not support large records, tpcopy will block the large input records into smaller ones that are acceptable for the device. The supported formats are SEGA. SEGB, SEGC and SEGD, for which, detailed and summary reports exist.

Disk Files

In order to write tape information to disk, one must generally make special arrangements for the record and file structure that exist naturally on a tape but not within a single file on a harddisk. When the tape has a fixed record structure or has a self describing data structure, it is not necessary to use such 'structure preserving' file types. Tpcopy supports the following three types of such disk files:

• Structure Preserving: Tpcopy's own format with happens to be equal to the way Fortran programs write sequential access files to disk.
• Structure Preserving: Western Atlas' Tape Image Format (TIF). A standard way to store LIS and BIT well log tapes in disk files. But it can equally well be used for other data as well.
• Without structure: Data is written as a stream of bytes to disk. This format is applicable for SEGY data (1 SEGY file per disk file), for tar tapes (automatically generating a valid tar file) and for self structured LIS tapes.

Data Analysis

Apart from during copying, Tpcopy can generate even more enhanced reports while reading the tape. We call this scanning.

• Scan for amplitude outliers in SEG-Y data. This will not only show spikes (when present) but it will also report the maximum data value and its location per SEGY data set. We find this last function useful for a quick check if two SEGY files are indeed different.
• Byte-for-byte comparison of two tapes. For SEGY files that should be identical but for a scaling factor, the option exists to automatically compensate for this scaling factor during the comparison
• Analysis of SEG-A and SEG-B multiplexed field files checking start of scan words, timing and gain.
• plotting:
  • single trace plotting.
  • multi trace wiggle trace plotting to screen.
  • multi trace wiggle trace hard copy plotting.

Supported drives and controllers

The program is compatible with the following peripheral PC controller hardware:

• Enersy controller boards for StorageTek (STC) and PERTEC interface tape drives.
• MCS controller boards for PERTEC interface tape drives.
• Adaptec SCSI adapters.
• ASPI compatible SCSI adapters.
• Advanced Torage Concepts (ASC) SCSI adapters.

Detailed list of Tpcopy commands.

SEG-Y data editing

Extensive editing for SEG-Y formatted data is available:

• EBCDIC header editing:
  • Manual EBCDIC header editing using a text editor.
  • Header replacement by user defined header texts.
  • Compaction of existing header and insertion of additional information
  • Automatic EBCDIC header generation if absent.
• Binary header editing:
  • Replacement of most of the standard values
  • Automatic header generation if absent.
• Trace header editing:
  • Sequence number generation
  • Shot point editing
  • CDP editing
  • Moving data between header positions.

Further details on data analysis features.

Automation of complex tasks

Scripting allows for the automation of complex and or repetitive tasks. The main features are:

• if then else control flow
• do while control flow
• nesting of scripts
• numeric expression
• user defined variables to be used for control flow and/or header editing
• special variables containing specific values related to the data on the tape such as shot point number, field file number, eof status, total number of bytes written to output, etc.

 

For more information please contact: Rene Peels(rpmail@its.com.ve)