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Archiving Video

E

Extremities

Gawd
Joined
Oct 27, 2000
Messages
597
I've been taking home video for quite a while now, and am quickly nearing my hard drive's 200gig capacity. My question is what's the best way to archive them without sacraficing quality? Obviously, burning the .avi's to DVD would be best, but horribly unefficient. Any ideas?
 
I'm not all that knowledgeable in this area, but since no one else has chimed in yet...

Burning to DVDs would be my first instinct. You can get a 50-pack for about $30. This would get you about 235GB at $0.13/GB. Throw a DVD tower in there for $80 or so (holds 75 discs), and you'd have a decently accessible, organized solution, I think.

Alternatively, you could just spring for a couple of extra hard drives. I picked up my 250GB for about $200. Much more expensive at $0.80/GB, but also much faster and more portable and flexible.

Or maybe you have the patience to wait for Blu-Ray to come out? :D
 
Where did the videos come from? Do you still have the original tapes?

I do video editing, and I keep all my MiniDV tapes in a safe place just in case. I capture the footage onto the computer, edit the video, and then burn the DVD. I have multiple copies of the finished, edited DVDs. If I need to make copies of the finished video, I can just copy the DVD.

I don't re-use my tapes, so if all else fails, I still have the original tapes. Once I create an edited video, I don't keep all of the raw footage on the computer. But, I do have the tapes to fall back on, if I ever needed to.

AVI files captured from a camera take up tons of space on a hard drive, so it's very impractical to keep all of them. But, as hard drive prices keep falling, you certainly could, if you wanted to.
 
Thanks for the replies.

The answer I was hoping for was a specific codec/settings to archive my footage in. But both answers were helpfull. I was asking the question for not only myself, but my brother, too. I have most of my original mini-dv tapes, but he has only his most recent, as I think he only has 2 or 3 tapes that he circulates. I was hoping there was an easy answer I wasn't aware of, but it's not looking that way.
 
Just dump your finished content back to DV tape... thats what I do. burning to DVD would be a better solution, but with DV at least you dont have to worry about quality loss.
 
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