Long Term Storage...

Sylvus wrote on 1/7/2002, 10:43 AM

How do most of you go about storing your clips long term? I am using Video Factory 1.0 and copied my first tape to my hard drive last night. The original capture AVI files are almost 20 gig in size.

The tapes will continue to degrade so I want to store these captures digitally for the long term however 20 gig for one tape is WAY to much to store that way.

I rendered to MPEG and it reduced the size but the quality was pretty poor. Especially once I re-rendered it and sent it to a tape.

I tried to .zip the .AVI but the time it took was VERY long for only reducing it to 93% of its original size.

I have made many smaller clips that I can burn to CD of course, but there are a still a couple that are too big for a CD.

I was just curious what method you all use for storing this type of stuff for the long term.

Thanks in advance...

Matthew

Comments

Former user wrote on 1/8/2002, 9:08 AM

This is my opinion since you asked.

Granted, tape will degrade over time, but I have many videotapes that are over 20 years old that still play. There has been audio frequency loss and some video quality loss, but this is analog tape.

Digital tape will not degrade as quickly because you are dealing with 0's and 1's. The difference between a 0 and 1 does not have to be great for the digital signal to still be viable.

The storage life of CDR's is still to be determined, although some claim 100 years.

I will store on my digital tapes until a full resolution reliable media is created. At worse, you can copy the tape occasionally to your computer and back, and this will renew the digital signal.

Just my opinion, not based on actual experience or data.

Dave T2