From: Christian Bruno (email suppressed)
Date: Wed Sep 24 2008 - 14:44:24 PDT
I want to second what Steven is saying. DVD is pretty low-grade and really not an archival format.
I am assuming you no longer have space for 50 beta tapes. Hard drive archiving would be far better than mere DVDs. But keep in mind, drives do fail. Redundancy is super important, and, as Steven notes, you kinda have to keep your drives fresh. Run them periodically, or better yet, every few months, copy them across another drive.
To be honest, I have very little faith in "digital only" archiving, especially as someone who experienced drive failure. Tape is still a better format for archival purposes. What is on those tapes are super important, and incredibly valuable to historians, researchers, filmmakers, and (hopefully) future policy makers. Make sure those tapes end up with someone who is aware of their value.
Incidentally, Larry Jordan (a Final Cut Pro guru) recently posted a short article on Hard Drives in relation to archiving one's projects. It has some thoughtful data, and might help you to consider your next step. www.larryjordan.biz/articles/lj_hard_disk_warning.html
I would be very curious of others opinions on this, especially those in the archiving community. I know that there have been issues over the years as to how one preserves work originally on video.
Christian Bruno
Date: Wed, 24 Sep 2008 21:25:02 +0100
From: email suppressed
Subject: Re: Digital Video format for archives.
To: email suppressed
Hi Matt,
If you intend to archive the material I would definitely not simply 'dump' to DVD. That's OK for viewing copies but for the longer term DVDs are not very robust or reliable and MPEG-2 compression is lossy and dogged by artefacts. Better to store the material on hard drive (or hard drives, keeping clones as back ups on other drives). A good video standard would be DV-PAL QuickTime (or DV-NTSC if you're in the USA) - non-Mac folks will be able to advise about AVI files, etc. It sounds like you have about 50 hours of material, with DV files at around 13 Gb per hour you would need 650Gb for all the material, so a pair of Terabite hard drives should be enough. Make sure you turn the drives on at least once a month to stop them seizing up. It would be a very good idea to also make tape copies to a good archival format like Digibeta.
Steven ___________________________http://www.steven-ball.nethttp://directobjective.blogspot.com/
On 24 Sep 2008, at 19:23, Matthew Geiger wrote:
Hello Everyone- I have to transfer about 50 3//4 inch tapes which will end up on DVD, we are planning on donating the tapes to a university or museum after we archive (they are the raw interview footage of hiroshima survivors from the 1980's). For our own archives we are planning on dumping to dvd and collectively know very little about digital archiving. If any one has any suggestions about file formats, brands of archival media etc.we would gretaly appreciate your advice. thanks Matt __________________________________________________________________ For info on FrameWorks, contact Pip Chodorov at <email suppressed>.
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For info on FrameWorks, contact Pip Chodorov at <email suppressed>.
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For info on FrameWorks, contact Pip Chodorov at <email suppressed>.