DVD longevity

[tom hardwick]

My first DVDs were made in mid 2002 on a Pioneer A0-4. Not having had much

experience with blank recordable DVD media (who had at that time?) I used

all sorts of brands. The good thing was they all appeared to be faultless

so I bought a spindle tub of 'Zero Defex', and stored a lot of weddings on

them.

Now, none of the Zero Defex discs play. The best ones manage to open the

menu page and stutter through the first chapter, but will do no more than

that, most are simply not recognised by any player that I can find. The

discs have been stored in temperate England, upright in CD Jewel cases,
effectively in the dark as they all sit alongside one another in a bookcase.

The surface of the discs is perfect and many have no labels stuck on them.

I've had to remake the DVD for various brides from the master Mini DV tapes.

Other DVD brands I've used have all been fine over the years, having labels

stuck on them or being surface printed in my Epson 900. I've never once
had
trouble with Verbatim discs or Ritek, but as the former are twice the price

of the latter my commercial work generally goes out on Verbatim. School

plays and so on will be pumped out on Ritek.

Of course having been stung I avoid Zero Defex (as I do Alfa Romeo cars),

though both are still brazenly on sale in the open market.

tom.

[Paul Chater]

"tom hardwick" <forums@theiac.org.uk> wrote:

My first DVDs were made in mid 2002 on a Pioneer A0-4. Not having had much

experience with blank recordable DVD media (who had at that time?) I used

all sorts of brands. The good thing was they all appeared to be faultless

so I bought a spindle tub of 'Zero Defex', and stored a lot of weddings
on

them.

Now, none of the Zero Defex discs play. The best ones manage to open the

menu page and stutter through the first chapter, but will do no more than

that, most are simply not recognised by any player that I can find. The

discs have been stored in temperate England, upright in CD Jewel cases,

effectively in the dark as they all sit alongside one another in a bookcase.

The surface of the discs is perfect and many have no labels stuck on them.

I've had to remake the DVD for various brides from the master Mini DV tapes.

Other DVD brands I've used have all been fine over the years, having labels

stuck on them or being surface printed in my Epson 900. I've never once
had
trouble with Verbatim discs or Ritek, but as the former are twice the price

of the latter my commercial work generally goes out on Verbatim. School

plays and so on will be pumped out on Ritek.

Of course having been stung I avoid Zero Defex (as I do Alfa Romeo cars),

though both are still brazenly on sale in the open market.

tom.

Tom, I've had exactly the same problem with "zero defex". I brought five
sometime in 2003.

They played ok until this summer then playback problems. Now none of these
work

in my latest computer or laptop.

However, I have managed to retrieve two of the disc's data, by using the
original computer/DVD

recorder which read the contents of the disc and transferring the data to
the computer's hard drive.

I've also use Sony, Verbatim and Imation. All these are fine and are older
than the "zero defex".

Paul Chater.

[Dave Watterson]

Sorry that you have had such DVD problems, Tom and Paul. I guess that today's
wedding videos are fairly long so that keeping a lot of them on hard discs
could be costly - and hard discs ALL fail eventually.

You have safety copies on miniDV but for anyone who does not ...

If your computer can read any of the files you can copy *.VOB files to hard
drive, rename them *.mpg and load them into Premiere Pro and some other editors.
Render them and save them as *.AVI again.

Personally I don't mind the thought of all my stills and movies fading away
over a few decades ... what does anyone really do with grandad's snapshots
for example? But I don't want them vanishing this quickly.

Mind you if I made films like you two maybe I'd feel differently. I would
also make darned sure to have safety copies on tapes in different locations
too. (Send a copy to relatives miles away or to friends overseas.) It scares
me how many people keep their safety copies alongside the masters. Fine if
the only problem is physical damage to a tape ... but one small fire and
both are gone.

As with computing: keep backups and keep them safe a long way from the originals.

Dave

[Peter]

"Dave Watterson" <david.filmsocs@virgin.net> wrote:

Sorry that you have had such DVD problems, Tom and Paul. I guess that today's
wedding videos are fairly long so that keeping a lot of them on hard discs
could be costly - and hard discs ALL fail eventually.

You have safety copies on miniDV but for anyone who does not ...

If your computer can read any of the files you can copy *.VOB files to hard
drive, rename them *.mpg and load them into Premiere Pro and some other
editors.
Render them and save them as *.AVI again.

As with computing: keep backups and keep them safe a long way from the originals.

Dave

Dave, Tom and Paul

External USB hard drives are coming down in price, I recently bought two
- for £70 and £80 and both are 250GB drives.

These are good because you don't need to have them on all the time, and in
my case I can keep a lot of 24 bit music files backed up. Even a lot of DV
video can be backed up on a 250GB drive. The real problem only arrises when
you want to store HD video, where each minute uses about 3 GB. (Michael S
has all the info on that subject).

I would expect that soon most external hard drives will not only be even
smaller, but cheaper too, and they are all plug and play.

Peter (sometimes known as Daisy ...)

[Ned C]

I have used external hard drives in a Firewire hot swap caddy for some years
for archiving. One of the advantages is that the master is stored as an edit
file so can easily be modified if necessary. I am now paying less than 40
cents/GB for HDDs, not as cheap as miniDV tape at around 19 cents per GB,
but more varied information can be stored. I have three year old home recorded
DVDs on Verbatim and they play perfectly.

We noticed during the AMPS judging that the entries showed various play characteristics
(a small number gave occasional dropped frames, sound drop outs at transitions)
using the CyberHome 300 DVD player. There are two factors we assume, the
quality of the disk and the quality of the transcode. It would be interesting
to find out if some software is more prone to transcode errors than others.


Another subject, having been away and just catching up; in answer to a question
we had 78 entries from 11 countries in the AMPS Fest this year. Standard
VERY high indeed.

Ned C

Dave, Tom and Paul

External USB hard drives are coming down in price, I recently bought two
- for £70 and £80 and both are 250GB drives.

These are good because you don't need to have them on all the time, and
in
my case I can keep a lot of 24 bit music files backed up. Even a lot of
DV
video can be backed up on a 250GB drive. The real problem only arrises when
you want to store HD video, where each minute uses about 3 GB. (Michael
S
has all the info on that subject).

I would expect that soon most external hard drives will not only be even
smaller, but cheaper too, and they are all plug and play.

Peter (sometimes known as Daisy ...)

[Dave Watterson]

Talking to an engineer friend about DVD life and the option of storing material
on hard drives he commented:

1. Hard drives fail, so you need to have at least two copies and transfer
them to new drives every couple of years.
2. When the new Windows OS arrives it may render all those files unreadable
because the file system will change.
3. He reckons the best bet would be to store on hard drives the raw bitstream
- not AVI, MPG or other proprietary file formats - though how we could attempt
that I have no idea! (Some digital still cameras allow you to download the
raw bitstream of images rather than have the camera process them into jpegs.)

We could always try carving the pictures on the rock walls of caves ....
that seems to last!


Dave

[Peter]

"Dave Watterson" <david.filmsocs@virgin.net> wrote:

Talking to an engineer friend about DVD life and the option of storing material
on hard drives he commented:

1. Hard drives fail, so you need to have at least two copies and transfer
them to new drives every couple of years.
2. When the new Windows OS arrives it may render all those files unreadable
because the file system will change.
3. He reckons the best bet would be to store on hard drives the raw bitstream
- not AVI, MPG or other proprietary file formats - though how we could attempt
that I have no idea! (Some digital still cameras allow you to download the
raw bitstream of images rather than have the camera process them into jpegs.)

We could always try carving the pictures on the rock walls of caves ....
that seems to last!


Dave

This is depressing news Dave, and if it turns out like that, then we should
all boycott the new Windows OS until they make it backwards compatible. I
fear it's all a devious plan to get more money out of us, by changing systems
so that we are forced to buy new gear. (Maybe I'll even convince Michael
of this one day!)

It's possible that there will be new programs written to enable the old files
to be re-written without loss, to any new OS format. (Maybe bitstream converters?
Convert to bitstream and back to the new OS files?)

I'm sticking to the external hard drive backup system, as I think the data
can then be easily transfered to another drive or (drives!) so that the chances
of loss are minimised. (Even if this has to be done every two or three years).

Anyone with any other ideas?
Peter

[Michael Slowe.]

Peter, you could actually be right about all the OS updates because often
the improvements seem minimal also, as you know, I am a passionate Mac man
and consider all editing and graphic work should be done on a Mac.

On the subject of archiving, which is the main point of this thread, I believe
tape to be the best and safest. Dave's cave wall carving is the best of
all but it's an awful drag to climb into caves all the time and the carving
takes forever. You must be able to re make DVD's though because they really
are of doubtful longevity but there is hope. I read that in Japan one disc
manufacturer is working on a new substance for disc surfaces which, it is
claimed, will solve the problem of deterioration. It is bound to come.
But, at the moment my advice is to archive to tape, preferably directly from
your timeline.




"Peter" <symphony@pocoanimato.co.uk> wrote:

"Dave Watterson" <david.filmsocs@virgin.net> wrote:

Talking to an engineer friend about DVD life and the option of storing
material
on hard drives he commented:

1. Hard drives fail, so you need to have at least two copies and transfer
them to new drives every couple of years.
2. When the new Windows OS arrives it may render all those files unreadable
because the file system will change.
3. He reckons the best bet would be to store on hard drives the raw bitstream
- not AVI, MPG or other proprietary file formats - though how we could
attempt
that I have no idea! (Some digital still cameras allow you to download
the
raw bitstream of images rather than have the camera process them into jpegs.)

We could always try carving the pictures on the rock walls of caves ....
that seems to last!


Dave

This is depressing news Dave, and if it turns out like that, then we should
all boycott the new Windows OS until they make it backwards compatible.
I
fear it's all a devious plan to get more money out of us, by changing systems
so that we are forced to buy new gear. (Maybe I'll even convince Michael
of this one day!)

It's possible that there will be new programs written to enable the old
files
to be re-written without loss, to any new OS format. (Maybe bitstream converters?
Convert to bitstream and back to the new OS files?)

I'm sticking to the external hard drive backup system, as I think the data
can then be easily transfered to another drive or (drives!) so that the
chances
of loss are minimised. (Even if this has to be done every two or three years).

Anyone with any other ideas?
Peter

[Ned C]

I agree with Michael that keeping the camera original tapes plus the edited
master tape (I make two archive copies) ensures that the material can be
recovered. I like the hard disk copy as it is easy to revisit an edit, much
easier than an EDL. I have copied all my old analog material (video8/Hi8/UVW)
to DVCAM 184 minute tapes. It is interesting that these transfers often look
better than the originals, I suppose the digital format reduces the noise
of analog. The problem now is storage space!! DV is still the best master
format for SD.

Ned C


"Michael Slowe." <michael.slowe@btinternet.com> wrote:

Peter, you could actually be right about all the OS updates because often
the improvements seem minimal also, as you know, I am a passionate Mac man
and consider all editing and graphic work should be done on a Mac.

On the subject of archiving, which is the main point of this thread, I believe
tape to be the best and safest.

[Ian Gardner]

"Ned C" <ned@apsvideo.com> wrote:

I agree with Michael that keeping the camera original tapes plus the edited
master tape (I make two archive copies) ensures that the material can be
recovered. I like the hard disk copy as it is easy to revisit an edit, much
easier than an EDL. I have copied all my old analog material (video8/Hi8/UVW)
to DVCAM 184 minute tapes. It is interesting that these transfers often
look
better than the originals, I suppose the digital format reduces the noise
of analog. The problem now is storage space!! DV is still the best master
format for SD.

Ned C

I think we have all been there with this DVD issue!. A few months ago our
friends contacted me to say that there dvd`s had stopped working. These were
cheap brand ones. I now use a proper brand to burn them on and also at a
slow speed. I also don`t like showing my films on club night from DVD. Even
at a high quality it doesn`t seem as good as MiniDV. Also I noticed the other
club night that the one`s that entered there films on DVD, the quality was
crap! They seem to render them at a really bad bitrate and quality. This
shows up as squares and generally crap quality. Theres no reason for them
to do this as there films are no longer then 5 minutes! They seem to think
that `I`ll just burn this quickly`. They print these lovely DVD cases but
the film inside it is a very poor quality. I won`t say what I thought of
the actual editing!

Ian Gardner