Archiving HD footage

[tingsern]

Best medium to archive is COMPUTER grade tapes (SDLT, LTO3, etc ...). You can get a "cheap" QUANTUM DLT tape drive - external (using eSATA) for about US$900. Then you dump the entire subdirectory of a complete project - whether it is Panasonic P2 MXF, Sony EX1 MXF, or Canopus HQ ... including the project files.

Then when your client wants you to do more work, take the tape out, restore the entire subdirectory to your working hard-drive, and ... presto - you have everything there.

DLT-V4 tapes are about US$50 each - 160GB native capacity.

http://www.cdw.ca/shop/products/defa...iew-_-Main+Tab

[Nerfboy]

Think I might just go with the hard drive option. Get a terabyte worth and that should last me awhile. I like to save HD def footage to cut up later too, not just whole projects.

HDV MPEG loses no resolution when converted if I shoot in 1440 x 1080i? I plan on upgrading my camera next year and getting something that shoots in 25p. Don't know if that modifies things a bit.

[STORMDAVE]

Obviously you'll lose some quality, but nothing much that you eye can see anyway.

If you are going with the hard drive route, at least backup to two different drives.

[wags]

What I did was **** in all my HDV footage as m2t clips onto two Terra Drives in my machine here. They hold allot of tapes and the originals are kept safe on tapes in the cupboard. Once I fill up the drives I will buy another $250 Terra drive and stick that inside my computer as well.

My computer now can edit the raw clips pretty well but If I need more responsive capacity I will convert the clips I need to Canopus HQ.

I know I will one day but I am not looking forward to moving to tapeless camera's as it's going to take a huge amount of time to archive the stuff onto something safe. No hardrives are not safe.

[swsw1550]

Hi Geoff,
Steve here from the Sunshine Coast, Don't go the hard drive way, they are not reliable enough for that, What I do is shoot every thing in HD and capture and work with it in Edius 5 and when finished I keep the original tape as back up. you could also print back to tape and just keep them in a dry dark place, As I own a computer company as well on the Sunshine Coast I have seen to many hard drives die for no reason at all, Your other option is since you have a Blu-Ray burner is to store them on BD-RW disk's, just buy a few 50GB ones on Ebay, The question is how long do you really want to store wedding footage for?

Cheers
Steve

[Jim N]

Just out of interest here is a new BD-R drive with gold disks that claims to be archival up to 200 years!

http://www.robgalbraith.com/bins/con...id=7-9316-9628

I agree with Steve, hards drives are too unreliable.

Jim