Video Backup Tidbit

[David Thrasher]

I'm in the midst of backing up my video project and I thought I would share a little tidbit to write down for future reference: a 700mb CD-R can hold up to 3 minutes 20 seconds of video in DV format. 

As insurance, in addition to my master mini-DV tape I've decided to save my finished project in DV format on CDs. Why DV? Because it can easilly be re-exported to tape if I need to do that and can be imported without any intermediate steps into iMovie.

Since my project is 25 minutes long, it obviously won't fit onto one CD so I'm splitting it into multiple segments. I'm using Quicktime Pro (the movie player) to accomplish this. I select the section of video by using the markers on the timeline, cutting the section out (Edit>Cut), opening a new player and pasting (Edit>Paste) and then exporting to a DV Stream naming each file appropriately. I throw away the movie I pasted into once this is accomplished.

If I ever need to reassemble the segments for export to tape (I'm using BtvPro to do this because of a bug in iMovie 2), I open a new player and then open each segment, select all (Edit>Select All) and paste it at the end of the previous segment in the new player (time bar moved to the end). When it is all assembled I export it to DV so that I can send it to tape again. If you happen to have a version of iMovie that will export to camera with no difficulties, you can simply import all the segements and assemble them in order on the timeline and use iMovie to do the job.