Standard 8, Hi8, MiniDV and HDV tapes. What to do with them?

[col lamb]

Over the years we have had numerous posts regarding storing and backing up our original video tapes. With many prefering to save the MiniDV tapes and others backing up to DVD the long term solution to storage seemed OK.

Is this still true?

As MiniDV camcorders will shortly become obsolute and your current MiniDV camcorder getting older and more well used what then for archiving and playing back MiniDV tapes?

I started shooting video with on a Standard 8 camcorder before moving up to Hi8 and then onto MiniDV. The MiniDV camcorder I got was a small Sony DCR PC100 with firewire output and input, thus I could record onto MiniDV the movie I had edited via the "Print to tape" option.

Whilst I still had both my Standard 8 and Hi8 camcorders I recorded all the tapes produced by these camcorders onto MiniDV tapes via the Sony PC100, now as this trusty Sony is 10 years old how am I to view my MiniDV tapes in years to come? The answer for me is to capture them all onto a hard disc.

My editing PC has two hard disc caddies, one for the boot disc and one for a hard disc used for a general document storage disc, a new 2Tb hard disk cost me £66 and this is now in my hard disc caddy and is busy being used by Premiere's capture utility to store all my MiniDV tapes. 38 tapes captured so far and many more to go.

Each completely full 60 minute MiniDV tape is showing files totaling 13.673414Gb so if we say that 14Gb of storage is required per tape and as a 2Tb disc formats to 1.8Tb we can get over 125 tapes on one hard disk. This will cost me 53p per tape which is way less than the cost of archiving to Bluray or to DVD (Bluray at £1.25/25Gb disc and DVD at 20p/4.5Gb disc).

When completed all the files I am likely to use will then be copied to my RAID disc array that I use for editing and the video store disc will be removed from the caddy and placed in a protective box and stored in a safe place.

[Dave Watterson]

Sounds like a good approach ... hard disc drives preserve a better version of your work without the compression needed to put the films onto disc.
BUT
Despite all the worries about disc life, hard drives probably have a shorter life than DVDs or Blu-Rays. Like many precision machines, they need to be run reasonably frequently to avoid problems. They WILL break down. The figure of 5-7 years is often mentioned as mean-time-before-failure - in other words an average.

So if you want to preserve your films longer you will have to keep running the drives now and then and copy all the data to fresh drives every couple of years. Digital copying should retain most of the original quality - barring the odd damage from cosmic rays.

Like any safety copies or computer backups you need a matching set in a different location to guard against the risk of fire, flood or theft.

You have to be really sure that the films are worth all that trouble.
I am not being rude!
I mean you must be sure that what you preserve is worth all that effort and cost for you. Not every film may have the same value to you.

-Dave

[ned c]

I am saving to external HDDs at present and await the price of SSDs (Solid State Drives) to fall to an acceptable level, at present between $3 and $4 per GB for external drives.

In another place there is a discussion about Sony equipment and its failure rate. I have a Sony HDV deck that cost $1800 to purchase three years ago and has since cost $2000 in repairs!! The best argument I have for solid state camera recording, the SDHC adaptor I use cost $15 and has not brokebn down. I have good results and reliability with Canon and Panasonic gear; the only JVC camera I ever owned was truly awful.

ned c

[Michael Slowe]

Well said Dave, the performance history of these drives is not encouraging. I don't even trust them to hold camera XDCAM files whist shooting a film, I back up twice before taking media into my edit hard drives.

Col, in my opinion you might do well to purchase a professional deck, such as the Sony DSR 20 which will play either Mini DV tapes or (its main purpose) DVCAM tape. I've had one now for about 14 years and there's been never a 'blip'. They are really solidly built and if you read Broadcast magazine you will see them being offered for sale. The hours reading cannot be fiddled I don't think but you would have to have it checked by a really reputable professional service outfit. Firewire, Component and S-video in and out. The only other suggestion I could make would be archiving your files (no quality loss here) to the gold DVD discs which, it is claimed, have a life of 100 years. Problem is, do the players?