Archiving Digital-8 footage

[CogoSWSDS]

A couple years ago my VHS-C camcorder died, so I bought a Digital-8 camcorder. I am pleased with the quality, but now it seems that Sony no longer makes Digital-8 equipment (tapes are still readily available though).

One of the advantages of the VHS-C camcorder was that I could pop the tape into an adapter and play it back on a regular VHS VCR, thus reducing wear on the camcorder. As there's no way to do this with the D8 short of buying a standalone D8 tape deck ($$$), I've been editing and converting to DVD, then playing back the DVD.

Here's my question. Can you recommend a way to archive the original DV footage? My concern is that when (not if, but when) my D8 camcorder dies, I will have no way to access the original footage. Should I archive to good quality DVDR media, or should I think of some other archival method? With DVDR media at about 0.60 USD each, this seems like an inexpensive way to do this, but I wanted to get the forum's thoughts on it.

CogoSWSDS

[thecoalman]

To store the video in it's native DV-AVI format you need like 4 discs per hour. Use a external or innternal hardrive instead, cost you about double or more what it would for the discs but its going to:
1. Save you a lot of time, you can capture directly to the external drive.
2. Is much more convenient, you can take the whole drive with you anywhere you want and your video isn't broken up into 4 parts per hour. Copying to another drive now or in the future... wel you get the picture.
3. More reliable. Even if the drive stops working in most cases you can still recover the data albeit at steep cost. On the other hand data is burned into a dye on discs, chemicals break down over time. How long is anyones guess but I've seen reports of disc failures already.


Make sure to save your tapes no matter what you do. I use external drives for storage myself which I keep close by for easy access. The tapes I store in a relatives house. Move them to a better storage medium when it becomes availalble, the more copie you have the better. I used the disc storage routine for awhile but it became to cumbersome, I still have them but won't be making anymore.

[edDV]

I have many original Digital8 tapes myself including dubs of my Hi8 and Betacam originals. I'm looking for one or two low usage D8 camcorders on Craigslist for hardware "backup". The important stuff I back to MiniDV or hard disk plus I also have most encoded to DVD MPeg2 for easy access. I don't consider DVD good enough as primary backup. In time HD/BD optical will be good for 1:1 DV format backup.

Something makes me believe those 8mm Digital8 tapes are going to last longer than the smaller MiniDV tapes.