Long term tape dumps/formats?

[mattp]

Hello,

I'm interested to hear views on the ability to save HDV to a common file format that doesn't tie me to a particular platform or software package.

My goal is this: I've never owned a camcorder before, but have a trip to antarctica coming up (GF being penguin mad and all) and she wants to record the experience. Its unlikely we would use the camera much afterwards, so I'm proposing to get one for the duration of the trip, import the media onto the computer, then sell the camcorder afterwards.

We can then play with editing it and see what we can make out of it. Maybe next year, maybe the following if some new whiz-bang software comes out that allows more interesting outputs/formats to be created.

In the photography world, as the software ability increases its allowed more latitude in the editing/output phases, and having those original raws from a couple of years ago sure helps to 're-create' an improved image (or not!).

Given that we are currently mac based, imovie could do the import. However, it seems it (transcodes?) uses the AIC format which is expensive for longer term storage, and are there any guarantees that other third party (or even apple) software would be able to read it in the future?

I see there is an M2T format that seems to be a dump of the tape contents. Is this feasible? I was having trouble finding a mac app to dump to this format?

The other camcorder I was considering is an avhcd model so doesn't have this particular issue, but has other ones!

Any suggestions/advice very much appreciated.

MattP

[tcindie]

You can capture to m2t using DVHSCap or VirtualDVHS, both are available as part of Apple's firewire SDK for developers...

https://connect.apple.com/cgi-bin/WebObjects/MemberSite.woa/wa/getSoftware?bundleID=19780

Double click the downloaded package file to install the SDK

DVHSCap and VirtualDVHS can be found in
/Developer/FireWireSDK19/Applications/

Then drop the m2t files onto an external drive that's formatted in a universally readable format (FAT32 would work, though there are max filesize limitations)

To get the footage into an editable format on the mac (assuming you don't have a version of FCP that can work with the m2t files) you can use the free program mpegstreamclip to convert them to quicktime so you can edit in any Apple application.

http://www.alfanet.it/squared5/mpegstreamclip.html

I use MPEG Streamclip to:
1) Locate clips of interest and set their 'in' and 'out' points,
2) Set the, optional, number of 'bad lines' to crop from the sides and top of each frame,
3) Re-scale, if desired, to 720p or 1080p,
4) Export to QuickTime...
5) Drop the resulting QT.mov file, which contains synced 'video and audio' data, into an FCP bin.

That's the best I can do to help you, being a PC guy.. ;)

[dng]

tcidindie is correct. I use VirtualDVHS to dump to an M2T format which for an hour show equates to roughtly 6GB instead of 25GB which is much more manageable than HDV. However i also keep the tapes which I record my footage as backups because tape is cheap nowadays.

[J-Roc]

When you export from Mpeg streamclip to Quicktime, Which settings do you use when exporting it? Do you use h.264 and then drop it into what ever software you are using?
Sorry about leeching on to you thread. Plus it might help Mattp as well.