am I stuck with piles and piles of raw footage?

[patchrik]

i made a dvd. Can i not use that video on the dvd for later editing or am I stuck with piles and piles of raw footage?? I guess what I'm saying is a dvd can only be viewed and not used a video or footage source?

[BJ_M]

it could be used - but mpeg is not designed as an editable format .. it would lose a lot of quality ...

[jimmalenko]

In an ideal world you should do all your editing straight from the source (in AVI if possible), instead of converting to MPEG-2, then authoring, then converting back to MPEG-2, then editing .....

[TheUnknownComic]

Somewhat related, what is the spacing of B, I and P frames? I'm sure there are no concrete numbers, but any general/rough numbers?

[patchrik]

So what you guys are saying is that either you have stacks and stacks of raw footage on mini dv or you edit and commit to DVD and never go back?

[Karate Media]

The fact is that mpg2 is a more compressed video format than the original DV footage. You are free to transfer your raw footage to DVD to re-capture it at a later date, but it will be of lower quality than the original DV footage. But you'll still end up with a bunch of DVDs that you'll have to capture from, so I'm not sure how it will be that much of an improvement, storage-wise (except maybe if you plan on getting 2 hours of footage on one DVD, instead of 1 hour on DV tape). If you want to re-edit your work in the future, you're going to have to go to the trouble of recapturing your footage one way or another.

I recently finished editing a 5 minute interview, culled from 1 hour of tape from the main cam and about 20 minutes of tape from a second cam. I saved the Premiere ppj file, and in the future I can recapture the footage, open up that ppj file, and it will be fine (more or less). I will also often export each video and audio track as a separate file, so that I can more easily fool with b-roll shots in the future, or tweak the audio. But most of my work is in :30 commercials, so it is fairly easy for me to save "raw" edited sections onto DVD for future use.

If you have a lot of important projects that you expect to have to re-edit in the future, you might consider getting an external drive enclosure and picking up a few IDE/ATA hard drives during the next big sale. You can pop in a HDD, save raw DV footage and the rest of your files to it, then when it fills up, pop it out and put it in a safe place, then install the next fresh hard drive. If you were doing this for a living, that would be the most dependable way to archive your work, as well as the best way to facilitate future access.

EDIT: I may not be clear on what you want to do... You said "i made a dvd. Can i not use that video on the dvd for later editing[?]" If you are happy with the final product, but may want to edit parts of it later, you can do two things in addition to what I mentioned above (depending on the length of the video): One, you can export the DV avi file back out to miniDV tape, maintaining the quality of the DV bitrate. Then you only have to worry about that one tape, instead of "piles and piles of raw footage." Or you can save the DV avi file to DVD as data -- breaking the video into 15-16 minute segments if need be. These are two other ways you can archive the final product in a better-than-MPG2 format.

[patchrik]

Great response KM. You gave me plenty to chew on and I had basically came to the same conclusion. It seems leaving video on tape for extended lengths of time can be questionable at best. If I were to somehow creat a way to catalog the tapes and place in a library how would I know they would even be "good" after a few years?

I do agree, the most ideal scenario would be a library of hard drives!

[Karate Media]

You wouldn't know. You could make redundant backups and check the tapes once every year or two, or just simply copy the video to a new tape every year or two (and in two years, we might be posting at blurayhelp.com and you'll be able to save two hours of DV footage to one disc, who knows...) Even if you were backing up to hard drives, I'd still say make redundant backups to other formats -- and even that DVD you just authored could get damaged in the next year... Some of it comes down to how important this footage is, I guess.