Is DV a good format for archiving?

[Bartenhagen]

A few months ago I purcahsed a DV camera but I have about 25 analog tapes from my VHS-C camera that I would like to archive on CD-R's soon. What is the best method to do this? Currently I don't want to edit or anything else I just want to get the analog video into a digital format to preserve it quickly and easily. Here is my thoughts, what do you think? I would like to but the Dazzle Hollywood DV Bridge and convert all of the tapes to a DV format. I want to do this so that all of my video is in the same format. Also can I copy a DV tape to CD-R easily? I would guess I would have to copy to the hard drive forst but that would not be a problem.

Thanks.

[vhelp]

No, That's the short answer.

...but it's better than keeping on VHS-C tapes, IF those tapes are waring
out too quickly. If they're not, just leave them on their, till you find the
best solution to transfer your VHS-C to DVD-R or whatever it was you
are trying to do - - archive'wise.

DV is just another format, though digital, and IS lossy. NOT lossless.
If you want to truely archive your VHS-C tapes, to the best of my
knowledge, capturing via analog, and arvhive them all to CDRs in the
AVI format, as files ISO format. Then, later, once you've perfected your
encoding proecess (yah, as if) you'll be able to finally burn them to
CDR or DVDR media in CVD or DVD format. But, don't get confuse w/
the DVD part. You source is not DVD. But, you can at least encode to
DVD specs and burn to DVDR media and play on your dvd player. But,
then again, a CDR would probably be use as good, after all, your source
is VHS not DVD. So, what I'm trying to say, is CDR is your best final
form of media to use. It's cost affective.

However, if money is no object to you, and you don't have the patiance
to learn the capture and encoding, then your bets bet is to just go out
and get a hardware MPEG-2 board, and capture in DVD format and burn
or author as a DVD. Plenty of software out their for this.
I don't know how well it will be for VHS-C sources, but you may want to
look into this. Just don't go thinking that if you create a DVD disk, that
it should be DVD quality. Cause it wont be! Just a heads up

-vhelp

[EricB]

Just another opinion...

I think DV is a great format to archive video. No, it is not "lossless" but the compression is far less than the mpeg2 of DVD formats. Also, as you get into editing, the DV format supports re-encoding only the areas where you add titles and transitions. The other frames have been encoded once and won't suffer losses from re-encoding.

I capture the VHS to DV and store a backup copy on tape. Edit the DV on the computer and backup the edited version on tape. Finally, I can produce encoded copies in VCD, SVCD or DVD depending on the target audience.

I'm very pleased with the quality and the ability to pass files from the computer to the camera and back with no further generation loss.

[xed]

Archiving video of any kind in DV format has 3 advantages:

[1] It is much higher quality than MPEG-2. Typical DV format
video uses 5:1 compression with a discrete cosine transform. By
comparison a typical MPEG-2 video file uses at least 25:1
compression. In terms of bitrates, DV clocks in at about 25 mbits/sec
whereas the highest MPEG-2 bitrate stops at 10 mbits/sec.

[2] You can store an hour of DV format video on relatively
inexpensive tape. The range runsf rom about $2.50 to $60 for
a 1-hour DV tape depending on whether you use Digital 8 or
DV (they both store in DV format but use physically different
tape formats). This sounds more expensive compared to the
$2 to $1 for a 20-hour DVD-R but not when you compare the
number of bytes stored per penny. DVD-R stores up to 4.7
gigabytes for $1 to $3, whereas DV tape stores up to about
22 gigabytes for $2.5 to $6.

[3] MPEG-2 is an older 1980s video encoding format which
exhibits noticeable artifacts even on mediocre TVs. DV exhibits
not visible artifacts even on an excellent TV. This means that
if you encode to MPEG-2, you will get all the visible artifacts
from that format if you decide to re-encode to a higher-quality
format like Divx (AKA MPEG-4). Whereas if you store your
video on DV, you can still encode to MPEG-2 or to Divx or
to some future (yet undefined) video compression format
like the yet-undevised MPEG-5 or MPEG-6 and you won't
get visible artifacts in your video.
To put it bluntly, MPEG-2 is a much lower quality video
format than DV. Storing in MPEG-2 and going to something
else like Divx will add visible junk to your video. Storing in
DV and going to Divx or some other format won't add
visible junk to your video.

The one disadvantage of DV format video is that it takes
a lot of space. If you store it on tape, you will also need a
device that can physically read that tape, and there are a lot
of digital video standards right now -- 1 inch monster D1
format (10 bit component video uncompressed), 3/4"
D3 format (8 bit composite uncompressed), DV format in
either Digital 8 or MiniDV tape, etc. It's a mess.
Of course we've got 2 competing "standards" with
writable DVDs, what with DVD-R and DVD+R. How about
DVDxR or DVD divided by R? Or maybe even DVD^R?

[kinneera]

[3] MPEG-2 is an older 1980s video encoding format which
exhibits noticeable artifacts even on mediocre TVs.

MPEG2 was defined in the mid 1990s. Do you really feel like you see "noticeable artifacts" on mediocre TVs when you watch DVDs, because I think most people would consider that completely untrue. Artifact transparency is typically achieved when MPEG compression is kept at around 8:1 compression, which is fairly close the to compression ratio on a properly encoded DVD. Nonetheless, DV is still superior from a fidelity perspective.

[ima2hd]

I certainly would not put vhs-c on dvdr. Put your vhs-c on vcd or svcd it is cheap and a vcd or even better a svcd will give u plenty of quality for the vhs formant. That is my two cents , however it would be nice to be able to play back those vhs-c copies back on dvd for friends and family. Maybe dvdr wil get cheaper down the road u can always put yur svdc's or vcd's on dvd later if it gets cheap. Cheers

[Thorn]

Go DV and save yourself some headache later: I encoded some DV footage into Mpeg a couple of years ago when I didn't know as much about encoding (and wasn't using a very good encoder). Now that I have a firewire card to cap DV and I'm encoding footage to DVD-spec video I'm disappointed that I didn't save the tapes... My new DV->DVD conversions look great, but the DV->mpeg1/2->DVD conversions don't look as good even after filtering because the source mpeg just doesn't have the same quality as the original DV tape.

xed is mostly correct except about MPEG2 being of low quality. Mpeg2 can have excellent quality in DVDs (provided it is encoded well and your dvd player has a good decoder). However the quality is dependent on the quality of encoding and the quality of the source material. Additionally it is a FINAL format, it shouldn't be used for anything that will be re-encoded later.

Moral of the story: If you can afford the DV tapes (not that expensive) to store all of the video, do it that way. Just archiving to DV tape won't take that long (just as long as the footage).
If you want any of the footage easily viewable/distributable by CD-R, then 'cap' the DV from the DV tapes and encode/edit the files into VCD(mpeg1) SVCD or DVD (mpeg2) or divx (mpeg4, but in avi file format). Then *keep the DV tapes*. You never know if you'll want to encode to a newer/better format or encode using a better process...

The bottom line is that you're covering your bases by keeping the tapes in DV format, because the tape shouldn't degrade like analog tapes do, and you're saving in the highest quality available for future unknown use.

[Bartenhagen]

So is it correct that I can leave the DV data on the actual tapes that I recorded on with no problems? I just figured out that 1 hour of DV takes about 13 gb of space. I don't know what I was thinking but I thought that I would copy a 30 min analog tape to dv and store it on a cd-r. Obviously this won't be possible. Would it be a good idea to capture 2 30 min analog tapes to dv and then transfer them back to a dv tape on the camera? Are the dv tapes a good long term storage media?

[Thorn]

A similar thought is being discussed in this thread: http://www.vcdhelp.com/forum/viewtopic.php?p=323621

Basically, the best and easiest ways do do anything are always under debate.

To answer your question, you can save DV material back to the DV tape. That's the easiest way (and the only way I'd save anything big in DV format).

You really have a bunch of options. For the best digital quality, (see the other thread) you can capture analog (requires an analog capture card rather than a DV bridge) and encode/store from there. You could also capture with the DV bridge (should be good quality) and save the resulting material to DV tapes for storage.

Aside from how you archive the tapes, you can create less bulky/awkward copies for viewing. Essentially, use Mpeg1, mpeg2, or divx/meg4 to create a nice copy of the videos that is much smaller (but not as high of quality -- great for viewing but not as good for re-encoding later). This you can put on cdr to share or watch. You can fit anywhere from 30 minutes to two hours on a cdr depending on the quality and format you choose. If you aren't worried about watching right now, just archiving to get the stuff off of the analog tapes, you can skip this for now.

I've had my DV tapes for a few years, but have no idea how long they last (if treated well). Does anybody have any information?