D8 capture vs. Mini DV capture

[njitgrad]

Several years ago when I moved from a Sony D8 camcorder to a Sony MiniDV camcorder I copied all of my old D8 footage (on Hi-8 tapes) to Mini DV tapes using firewire transfer so that I could move away from having two different formats of tape.

I never did get rid of the D8 tapes so today I basically have the same footage on both types of media. My plan is to dump all of my raw footage onto my HD as DV AVI and then back those files up on SL Blu-Ray for long term storage, allowing me to toss the tapes. I may be able to get two tapes worth onto one Blu-Ray.

My question is....if I were to dump the footage of a D8 tape onto my hard drive (via Pinnacle 18), will everything about the footage be identical to the version of the same footage that I backed up to MiniDV tape as mentioned above? From my understanding these two formats are virtually identical (at least for what I use them for) and no data loss should have occurred when I transferred the D8 to the MiniDV via firewire years ago.

Thanks!

[smrpix]

The tapes are theoretically identical, though whenever something is copied or duplicated there is always the possibility of data errors.

I would trust HDD as a long term storage medium more than Blu Ray. Get a second backup drive. Tossing your originals is never a good idea, but certainly less of an issue with DV than VHS or film.

[njitgrad]

Thanks for the info.

I forgot to mention that in addition to archiving to Blu-Ray I was going to keep the footage on my HDD which is dedicated for video (and which is always backed up onto another HDD).

Wondering why you feel Blu-Ray is not very reliable??

[smrpix]

I forgot to mention that in addition to archiving to Blu-Ray I was going to keep the footage on my HDD which is dedicated for video (and which is always backed up onto another HDD).

That's smart.

Wondering why you feel Blu-Ray is not very reliable??

Recordable disks are dye-based which is inherently less stable than pressed disks. If light can encode the data, it can also destroy it. The truth is, no one really knows how long BRs will last in real-world conditions.
http://www.thexlab.com/faqs/opticalmedialongevity.html

[Cornucopia]

If they are of good quality, they are reliable.

Scott

[JVRaines]

A couple of notes — tapes can degrade and so can the performance of the playback device. DV has built-in error correction that camouflages data loss. It's possible that your Digital8 tapes will not play back as well as the MiniDV copies and the difference may be hard to detect visually. Here is a tool that will analyze your captured DV file and tell you how much error concealment is being applied.

On the subject of hard drives, be aware that drives must be powered up from time to time to keep the mechanism in running condition. You may also want to store file checksums and verify them periodically to ensure that the stored data has not changed.