What you refer to as RAW video has already been compressed. Assuming you are generating a DV25 file (about 4:1 compression) via an consumer level A/D converter, you will generate about 13GB per hour of video.

Converting to MPEG2 will compress by another factor of about 5 beyond the DV25 standard.

Short of going to a professional standard, your HDD idea is probably the best. I'm not sure you will be able to tell the difference between DV25 and any of the pro formats, however, when the original was Hi8 shot on a consumer level camcorder (my assumption).

It's that old dilemma - when to jump on the technology train, knowing that 6 months later something better and cheaper will appear.

i also have hi-8 footage that needs to be archived, but the priority is to not compress it... so i'd rather not put it to dvd or dv.

i'd like to have it played back via a tbc, into one of those blackmagic cards, where it'll get stored in an uncompressed format.

ouch! uncompressed avi's?
why not to at least to DV thats what I did with my old Hi8 stuff....
I dont see any reason save Hi8 quality at uncompressed avi bitrate.
in the words of Dennis Miller:
"course thats just my opinion.....I could be wrong....."

I just make DVD burnable mpeg 2 archive files. That way I can pick the material I want to burn to DVD at any given point and author a disk with no further compression since the mpeg 2 goes on to the DVD without another step of decompression/compression. It also is pretty efficient space wise.

The problem with converting to mpeg2 of course are many fold.

1. You can't easily edit Mpeg2
2. It takes a long time to convert/compress from "RAW" video to mpeg2.

What I meant by "raw" was simply using the firewire connector on my Sony Hi8 Consumer Cam and transfering the video on it to hard drive and doing nothing else with it.

Of course, perhaps in the future there will be a way to easily edit to mpeg2. Just seems to me that storing on hard drive at today's prices (and they keep dropping) seems to make the most sense.

My biggest concern is that my DVDs will be obsolete in about 5 years. How will my kids or even grandkids be able to see these "old" videos? Instead of trying to constantly move to the next great thing, why not store it in pure digital raw format ?
My intuition tells me though that as hard drives get bigger, faster and smaller then it seems to make sense that this will eventually be the preferred medium for storage. I can get a small sandisk chip that can store 2GB! If storage technology can double every 6 month to 12 months then in 5 years I will be able to store 10GB - 20GB on a small square chip in 5 years!

VideoGun, the firewire transfer from your camcorder isn't uncompressed. It's DV.

DVD has been spectacularly successful, so I would expect the format to last for many decades. After all, we still have NTSC television, which was first developed in 1939.

Encoding to MPEG2 (DVD), if done correctly, is transparent. There will be no loss in quality. If your source is less than perfect, then you can encode at an even lower bitrate and it will still be transparent.

No offense, but are these Hi8 tapes of the pope, or the Queen of England or Roswell Aliens, maybe Elvis live in Vegas???? I don't think NASA or Mr. Lucas archive with no compression. But, I digress....

If you have 40 hours, I'd buy a bunch of miniDV or DVCam tapes and S-video the footage to the digital realm and put the originals in a cool, dry, dark place and enjoy your memories now. Hi8 even in HD will still be Hi8 which is SD. I'd start by getting them to DV to save the originals and then go from there. DV25 has more than enough color and resolution to deal with SD footage from consumer analog format circa 1990.

Now, if you mean that you have 8mm or 16mm... then perhaps wait since those formats technically have resolution that would benefit from transferring to an HD format or uncompressed SD format.