DV Strategy

[BillP2]

I'd appreciate any thoughts regarding work flow and storage strategies for raw DV tapes.

For reason of cost (e.g. re-use the tapes), I'd like to transfer the DV "footage" to DVD in some format that would allow selected portions to be taken out and used to piece together "home movies" in Pinnacle for burning to finished DVD movies.

I suppose that the DV has to be brought into the computer in AVI format, but doesn't an hour of AVI take up much more than a DVD for archiving purposes?

If I create a DVD from the AVI file(s) and then erase AVIs, is there a way to take scenes off the DVD for re-use in another project that will approach the quality of the original?

----------------- Bill

[pijetro]

NO, as far as cost, content, and quality, the best thing to do, is to keep the tapes in a safe place, and when you're ready to make your home movie compilation, take the tapes out of the vault...

For reason of cost (e.g. re-use the tapes), I'd like to transfer the DV "footage" to DVD

You could, i suppose, put the raw data, onto DVD discs, but it's way too time consuming..
IMHO, at a few bucks a tape, i don't think they're too expensive..

I suppose that the DV has to be brought into the computer in AVI format, but doesn't an hour of AVI take up much more than a DVD for archiving purposes?

Bingo. About 13gigs an hour...

is there a way to take scenes off the DVD for re-use in another project that will approach the quality of the original

Yes, you'll lose quality. But how much is another story...

Keep the tapes archived....

[piano632]

DV is automatically in an .AVI file when transferred to a computer via firewire. Quality is identical to the DV tape and you can easily integrate footage into future projects, but you can only fit about 20 min. on 1 DVD. I guess 3 DVD's are still much cheaper than 1 DV tape.

[jimmalenko]

Hows about transferring the DV to a hard drive for storage until it's required ? A 200 GB hard drive will hold roughly 14 hours of DV, for a reasonable expense.

[edDV]

60min MiniDV tape can be found for less than $3 ea.

You can get around 20 min of DV-avi on a single layer DVD but you can't directly record or play back the 25Mb/s stream. For comparison, a 16x DVD playback is only 22Mb/s or not quite fast enough. Future 24x DVD technologyis probably the minimum you would want for reliable record or play.

So you will need to first transfer the DV material to the hard drive at 1X and then store portions to a DVD at less than 1x. If you are into any volume, this will become very time consuming. The $3 price for a tape starts to look worth it.

[ZAPPER]

I tend to think that DV is "the best" source file that you can have. You do have a few options of what to do with it and that could depend on what you want to do with it. First, I say, keep your original tape as is, treat it like a photo negative and store it well. Shoot on the best that you can afford, even at five dollars a pop, you got something pretty good, an hour of video that you thought was worth shooting, so keep it. So you want to archive it too huh? Well that sets off the great debate. You can copy it as is to another tape or save it on a harddrive or put it on DVDs in one format or another. But since DVDs will only hold about 20 min worth of DV file you may want to cut out any unusable footage and see if you can fit one tape on only two DVDs. This is easy for most people I think or atleast me anyhow because I hardly ever completly fill a tape and there are the lens cap shots and the feet shots and the oops I left it running shots and what have you. But be careful when you cut you can be missing useful sound or interesting back ground conversations that could come in handy when editing your final movie. And also as long as you have the orginal tape you can always go back and get that stuff if you decide to. So lets say that you can save your tape to two DVDs, for what one or two bucks depending on what type, brand and the sale of the day. Another option is saving it semi permanent on a hard drive. I don't know, maybe 20 bucks and less can get you a 40gig drive that should hold three tapes raw maybe four or more trimmed down to the good stuff. Or you could get a huge drive and depending its size and how much cutting you do could hold the contents of about 15-20 tapes. (I am figuring on loosing about 30% of my original footage for any thing that I intend to distribute but this can vary greatly and for personal veiwing I keep it all)

Now going back and looking at what can be done. I figure it best to just keep everything on the original tape and a back up tape if it needs to be archived. Make and keep a good log book of the tapes and the scenes including dates, content, time code, and any relevent info. And when you are ready to make a movie just pluck out the scenes that you want and edit into the creation that you have in mind. And then you can burn the movie to DVD for the end product.(Damb, kind of right back where I started. I guess the last four sentences would have enough. huh? )