[MacDV] Re: Drives Vs DVD's for long-term accessible storage--MacDV Digest, Vol 6, Issue 9

[Ted Langdell]

Ted Langdell
Ted Langdell Creative Broadcast Services
Marysville, CA
Main:  	(530) 741-1212

Something else to consider:  Your time, plus wear on your machinery.

On Jan 8, 2005, at 6:53 PM, Gregg wrote:

> One final tip - seeing as you are going to the trouble of transferring 
> your
> DV tapes to DVD data disk, it would be wise to keep the master DV 
> tapes in a
> separate physical location from the disks (or alternative make a 
> duplicate
> set of all the DVD disks and keep them off-site). If the unthinkable
> happens, such as a fire or theft, you will still have your cherished 
> family
> memories somewhere. The drop in the price of blank DVDs over the last 
> couple
> years has finally made this an affordable option.

Ted added:

The drop in the price of hard drives (both ATA/IDE and FireWire) makes 
that an affordable option, especially since you capture and "handle" 
the video file just once, compared to at least twice with archiving to 
DVD, and don't have to reload all the clips off the DVD's ONTO a hard 
drive in order to do the editing you outlined.

At apx. 13GB per hour of DV footage, you can calculate what you might 
be looking at, cost-wise.

As an example, I've seen prices drop at Fry's on a variety of drives in 
the last few days, so it might be worth checking out that store in 
person or online at outpost.com.

A bare (ready to install in your computer or FireWire case) Seagate 
200GB Ultra100ATA w/ bounceback express backup software normally sells 
for $149.99 which is a good price. I was out the door today with one 
for $114.99 on sale, and then there's a mail in rebate for $40, through 
1/13.  One drive, one rebate per household, so take your friends, not 
family.  Your final cost is $74.99 not including tax.  Add a FW case if 
you're aren't/can't install internally... for $40-60, and you're still 
doing well.

The 200GB drive will store somewhere near 15 hours of DV capture, 
(depending on what the formatted capacity is), so your cost per GB 
(drive alone) is $2.66, not including taxes, etc.  If you have to 
handle the video clips three times (as in sending to DVD and then 
transferring back from DVD) figure you're time into the process, plus 
the hard drive(s) you'll have to buy when you decide to DO the project 
in order to handle all those GB of video you want to work with.

Hollywood production and post-production houses face the same thing on 
a much larger scale... Terrabytes worth of digitally captured and 
manipulated film. (TB= 1000GB in simple terms) These companies are 
buying disk drive assemblies that are 30, 50, 100 TB capacity.

Oh, and DVD's?  Who's sure how long they're going to be stable, 
recoverable?  You're better off if you burn at 1X speed, for a "deeper" 
longer-lasting backup, according to what some folks are reporting.


Good luck, whatever you decide to do. As Gregg said... Keep the 
original tapes in a safe place.

Ted.