Archiving lots of DV

[nsdn]

its been a while.

A long while back I archived all of my old analogue tapes to DV tape (because the tapes were loosing oxide). But now my DV camera is about to die and its nearly time to buy a new one. I will probably get a hard disk based camera, but where does this leave me with my 40 or so DV tapes I have?

I need to get them on to the hard disk but transferring 40 DV tapes will take near enough to 800gig.

Can someone suggest a codec that is near enough to lossless and that will result in a AVI stream that Adobe premier likes? ie a format that premier won't have to convert before it can do anything.

if I can get my library down to about 400gigish I will buy two drives for redundancy

I do not want to use DVD and MPEG 2 for obvious reasons, I am comfortable with mpeg 4 (divx/xvid) but I expect these are as difficult to edit and as lossy as mpeg2

Any suggestions?

[JohnnyMalaria]

If your DV tapes are SP and not LP, you will "only" need about 520GB which is much more affordable option than 800GB. LP does need about 800GB - is that what you have?[

For truly archiving the tapes, you really should leave them in DV format. Converting to MPEG2 involves loss of data. If you are never going to edit the videos, it probably won't matter but if you are going to then keeping to DV is highly recommended.

Another benefit of keeping to DV is you just capture the tape and your done. No need to convert. That will save a lot of time.

[fredfillis]

I'm going the other way to preserve my video, I'm putting it all on minDV tapes!

A couple of ideas for consideration. Buy a low(ish) end miniDV camera to ensure you can play the tapes in the future and keep the camera and tapes in a safe place.

Alternatively, disk space is cheap! I'm considering eSata (external SATA) myself, 500GB seagate drive for around $150. Same performance as an internal. I'd be loathe to use USB or Firewire. If you don't have eSATA on your mobo, the seagate comes with a PCI card that gives you 2 x eSATA ports.

Of course, kinda hard to capture 40 tapes with a dead / dying camera!

[nsdn]

The mini DV tapes are in Sp and from memory thats about 18 gig per tape.

thats exactly what my thinking was 3 or 4 years ago when I transfered all my old video 8 tapes to DV, so 20 of those 40 are actually a TV capture card using a DV codec then poked onto mini DV.

I have to remember that you can't trust hard drives which means I would have to buy 2 drives for redundancy.

I can buy another cheap DV camera to be sure but even DV tapes degrade....hard drives at least do not. I was thinking about archiving then wrapping one of the drives in its antistatic foil and putting it in a safe.

[redwudz]

.........but even DV tapes degrade....hard drives at least do not.

I wouldn't say that about hard drives as a blanket statement. The bearings can dry out and the drive may fail for other reasons, even if not used. But both hard drives and DV tapes can last a fairly long time if properly stored.

For long term storage, I would go with DV tapes. For convenience, the hard drive solution may work well enough.

[nsdn]

Well, These days $240 AUD for a terrabyte of storage is pretty good. Fortunately its only 12 gig per tape, which is less than i remembered....and 500gig is roughly 39 tapes (according to premier)...so 2 x 500 is more than enough, but with no redundancy, still drive prices will continue to fall so I can add redundancy later, will not be throwing away the tapes till I have redundancy though.

[cosmin]

If you have time to split clips of about 15 minutes and save them to DVD-R, it may be well worth it.
At least with those video fragments that you cherish most. Put them on Verbatim VideoGard or other durable DVD media, and make duplicate copies. Perhaps 15+ years from now you'll be happy you did that.