Archiving SD Footage

[mrob7]

I have a bunch of MiniDV tapes from when I used my sony dcr-trv27 (standard def) camcorder which I want to digitize so that they won't deteriorate on the tapes and also have if I want to burn to a dvd or data disk in the future or even edit. What is the best way to archive these on my hard drive?

[Lunchbox]

You already answered your question. The best way is to archive them on your harddrive.

[gmmllc]

You already answered your question. The best way is to archive them on your harddrive.

...unless the Earth's poles reverse themselves. Then you might have problems retrieving your data from your magnetic disk. Since SD does not take up that much space, why not archive to DVD R? They are cheap.

Of course, if that happens, we might have bigger problems.

[Lunchbox]

DVD-r can store 4.3GB or 9GB (dual layer). File size of SD footage is same as HD footage which is 13GB per hour. You will have to split each 1 hour SD AVI file into 3 files and store them on regular 4GB DVD-R.

Unless you burn DVD-R using UDF format, regular ISO DVD max out each file at 2GB. You will have to further break down your 13GB into 7 AVI files before you can save to DVD.

As we all know, DVD-R are notorious of it's instability. I have so many expereience that home burn DVD becomes unreadable after a year or so. So, you might want to make 2 backup copies to backup your backup. Now it takes 6-8 DVDs to backup 1 MiniDV tape.

For my video project, I did backup the final edited AVI back to Mini-DV tapes, DVD-R as well as harddrive.

[wertert]

Hi -

ever considered creating parity files ( PAR / PAR2 ) along side you split archive ? Checkout tools like FSRAID or quickpar. I split my 14Gb file into 120 pieces and create 40 PAR file.

I then backup using 4 x DVD-R. 30 data files and 10 PAR files per DVD-R. I could lose upto 40 of my original 120 pieces (33%) before being unable to recover the data. I can also deal with one of the 4 DVD-R becoming completely unreadable.

checkout www.par2.net

jeff