DV Video. What to do with it?

[jranaudo]

Just curious what everyone does with their DV video. I currently use a mini DV camcorder. When a tape is full I capture the tape and make a bunch of movies which I encode to mpeg2 and more recently x.264 for quick viewing on my home theater pc. I leave the original on tape.

So what do you do with your videos?

1) Store them on HD in raw DV format (huge storage requirement if you include backups)
2) Encode and store on HD (less storage requirements but lower quality video)

I guess my dilemma is that using my method my videos are of lower quality than their original raw format which is not the ideal way to view my movie.

Can I get some opinions on this?

[edDV]

1. Hard disks are cheap. I keep two DV-AVI hard disk copies + original tapes. The hard disk files get copied to new drives every few years.

2. This may be necessary for viewing on media players or DVD but should not be considered the archive. Future TV sets and deinterlacers will get better. You will need all the quality from the original tape. This goes tripple for family legacy videos that must live on for decades.

[jranaudo]

so maybe a better way is to leave the video as is in the raw format after we edit it then buy one of those pluggable hard drive bays so I can swap out drives. hmmm.... Not all movies will be online all at once which is not too big a deal.

OR I could buy an external drive array to have everything online all the time then have a backup set of drives stored somewhere safe.