Video Storage suggestions?

[wadebbie]

Haven't been on this forum in a while. I have made over 100 VCD's but I have also another project which I would like to get some suggestions on. I have several peices of large DV .avi files that I would like to keep in order to go back later to edit & still maintain high quality. I thought of converting them to DVD w/TMPGEnc and then if re-edit needed, convert with DVD2AVI. Looks okay but does suffer some quality loss. What is the best (low cost) solution does anyone suggest? (i.e. several HDD's, DVD-RAM, DVD-RW etc.

Thanks

[ktnwin]

I assumed you want no quality loss. There are two ways:

1) if you have a digital camcorder, you can record those DV AVI to DV tapes. The only problem is it take times to output and recapture them (transfer rate about 3.6 MB/sec)

2) use backup tape cardtrige (DLT for example), this is more expensive but the speed is wonderful (not limited to 1X real play time as with DV camcorder)

[wadebbie]

Thanks ktnwin. I had not considered tape drives. I think eBay about $200-$400 for large storage. I have been considering DVD-RW. Does anyone have any experience with this? (storing mpeg2, mpeg1 and VCD). HP just announced a new DVD-RW drive and I am thinking (hoping)the price should go down soon (around $600 now).