Best way to archive a bunch of DV / Digital Hi8 tapes?

Best way? Well, if you've never done it, there are services that will transfer you movies for about $5 to $10 per tape.

I want to get the video off in a format that will save disk space rather than the 'fat' dv files yet retain the quality for the future iMovie / iDVD project.

Contrary to popular belief, DV is compressed video. You can't compress it more without losing quality.

So you have to have the 13GB per hour DV or compromise quality. It's your choise.

Hard drives and mini-DV tapes are so cheap nowadays, I encourage you to stay with DV.

Hi,

I too am looking at 10 years of digital hi8 footage and thinking the time is here to archive it from tape to ?

I've just bought an iMac and have made a few videos using iMovie 6. My goal would be to archive all video into a format I could easily use for future video making. So if I understand you, the .dv format is the best available, though large. I'm thinking of using DVD's since I don't want to rely on ONE hard drive that might have a problem. However if one hour of dv is 15 gigs that is a lot of DVDs. Do you have any advice?

thanks,
Paul

I agree with Lennart.
If your video footage is already in digital format, just keep it on the tapes until you wish to edit them in iMovie. The tapes are small, easy to store and will be waiting until you decide to do something with them. Analog tapes are another story as they are prone to degradation.
I converted all of my old VHS tapes (several from 26 years ago!) to mini DV tapes using my mini DV camcorder; then I imported the footage into iMovie from the camcorder, but only a few tapes at a time as I used them in my movies. Because I have at least 200 hours of video footage, that would have been a huge amount of drive space if I imported all of those videos into my computer. However, because the VHS footage was starting to degrade, I wanted to get it all converted to a digital format and then have time to import that footage a bit at a time.
I have been making DVDs of all of our home movies and putting in all of our corresponding family photos. It has been a long process, and I didn't want the VHS tapes to further degrade while I was taking time to create the movies. I have done all the photos and videos from 1979 through most of 2008, and it has taken me about five years to do that. Now, I am going back to do the early years of each side of the family and although I have most of the photos scanned in, I have several thousand slides to scan.....another two years' worth of work I think 😟
I was also concerned about losing all that data if a drive failed. Having had three external drive failures in the past six months, I did not want to rely on that as my primary storage.
I keep my raw tapes in a plastic bin in a closet; even 200 hours of tapes takes up about as much space as four shoeboxes.
Although you can put the raw footage on DVDs, you need to make archive DVDs so that the data is not compressed, and you will get only about 20 minutes per DVD. So my advice is to stay with the tapes. Even the digital hi-8 ones are small, and if you have a hi-8 camcorder, you can import directly from it into iMovie. I had the even older Hi-8 analog tapes and again had to convert them to digital mini DV tapes, also.

After I edit the footage in an iMovie, I export that edited version back to mini DV tapes with my camcorder so that I now have a collection of mini DV tapes of edited iMovies as well as the raw footage tapes. I am still using iMovie 6 because it allows the exporting back to camcorder that iMovie 8 does not. Being paranoid about losing my video footage, I did not want to rely solely on my DVDs as the only copy of my edited iMovies. I make 5 DVDs of each iDVD project and keep one copy of each in my safe-deposit box. I also store another copy of each at my daughter's house, and my son's, plus two copies that I keep at home in different locations.
Once you lose any movies or photos on a failed drive, you realize that it is much easier to save than to recover.....and much less expensive!
I also now save a copy of any iMovie in progress, on another external drive ( I have four currently) so that I won't lose my edits if a drive suddenly, without warning, just gives up and won't mount or open.

Just my advice 🙂 Good luck with your project.

Beverly

And, once I have finished my iMovie and my iDVD project, I also create disk image files of all my iDVD projects, and I save all the disk image files on two different external drives. Doing so gives me the ability to burn a DVD of any of my iDVD projects at any time, without having to save the original iMovie or the original iDVD project. Being able to delete both of these saves drive space.

Thanks Beverly, I appreciate the advice. You sound VERY thorough. The idea of backing up ten years of video footage onto DVD was making me nervous, especially with only 20 minutes going on each DVD. I will keep the tapes safely stored for now and hope that I will always be able to access a camera to play them on.

I make the ocassional edited video (www.paulweber.ca), but most of my footage is for me to work on in retirement, when people will really enjoy seeing their younger selves. And probably in another decade it will be easier to backup all my digital tapes (if not sooner). Now with the time I've freed up by deciding to stick with the tapes I can spend five years organizing my photos in Picasa!

cheers,
Paul

Wow, I have now found somebody as paranoid as I am!

I agree fully with Beverly. I also had a lot of Hi8 tapes that were starting to degrade and a camera that died so that I could not even replay the tapes anymore. I bought a Digital8 player and used that to digitize the tapes. I chose the multiple/duplicate hard drive approach using imovie to import the video and storing it at 13gb/hour. For some very critical events I also made Mini DV copies.

I have scanned 10,000 slides/negatives and have these burned to multiple DVD copies in multiple locations. DVD's go bad occasionally so you cannot be too careful and the digitizing took 2 years. With the price of hard discs dropping, I will also make more copies as they get cheaper, with the old drives as further backup.

I am now making the combined family videos/slide shows with some iPhoto books for the very special occasions. The work was worth it as the treasured moments of young kids, their voices and hilarious sayings are brought back to life. It is what a Mac is really for.

Dave

+It is what a Mac is really for.+

How right you are!

Contrary to the opinions posted above, digital 8 and miniDV tapes will not last forever. To prolong their useful life span, it is recommended that you fast forward and then rewind them every couple of years (to equalize the tension and redistribute the lubricant on the tape surface).

Check out these web sites:
http://www.nationalarchives.gov.uk/documents/media_care.pdf

http://www.larryjordan.biz/articles/lj_videotape.html


I personally archive all my tapes to DVD. My concern is not as much for the life span of the tape, as it is that one day my camcorder may fail and I will have no way to play them without investing money in a new deck just to play old tapes.

Realizing that DV to DVD will involve some loss of quality, I am willing to live with this.

My workflow for archiving is as follows:

Open iMovie and choose 'make a magic iMovie'. Choose no transitions. Plug in camera and walk away. Come back an hour later and the tape has been downloaded and all the clips are in the time line. I delete the default fade in and fade out at the start and end of the project, then save the project.

Open up iDVD, from the file menu, choose make a magic iDVD from iMovie file (or something like that). It burns the movie to a simple DVD (no menus etc).

Although this takes a couple of hours of computer time, it only takes a few minutes of my time. You can process a tape when you are not doing other things with the computer (as you go to bed each night for example).

I have tried to make magic iDVDs directly from the camcorder, but have had a few crashes and problems with this, so I like to get all the footage in an iMovie project so I can check it quickly before going to burn the DVD.

Also, keep in mind that if properly stored, high quality DVD disks should last a long time. However, if you buy the cheap disks or if you do not store them well, DVD disks will also become unusable after a time.

There are a couple quick and easy ways to accomplish what you want here - to archive your tapes...

#1 Use iMovie to import to a new movie project. When done, save it then right-click the project file and chose "Show Package Contents". Inside you will see all the .dv files you just imported. You can do anything you want with these (convert in batch using Handbrake, copy to large hard drive, etc).

2. Another route is to use Quicktime Pro. Costs #30 form Apple and well worth the cost! Open Quicktime Player, then go to File-->New Recording and go to war. Check the Quicktime Player preferences to set the source as your connected camera for both audio and video. This route is dope because you can also set the format you record to. So you can set H.264 for strait mpeg-4. I'm spending this week doing this very thing - agh! TIP: If you move from a humid place to a dry place or visa versa - FF then REW your tapes - they hate humidity change.

+I personally archive all my tapes to DVD. My concern is not as much for the life span of the tape, as it is that one day my camcorder may fail and I will have no way to play them without investing money in a new deck just to play old tapes.+

This is certainly a legitimate concern, which I share with you. I am trying to keep at least one miniDV camcorder in working order to play back the tapes when needed to put them onto a new format. That is the reason I am using iMovie 6, so that I export my edited movies.

But, I am also concerned about the longevity of DVDs, and that they may eventually go the way of 8-track tapes...are you old enough to remember these? 🙂 Already we are seeing camcorders going to some type of memory cards. And, even though the 'next step' for DVDs seems to be the Blu-ray version, look at the VHS tapes. They lasted about 12-15 years in popularity and then lost to the better format of DVDs. DVDs will surely be replaced by some other format in the next 10 years. So, being paranoid about my movies, I like to have them on two different formats: mini DV tapes and DVD disks.
Just as we have the decks that can record from VHS to DVDs, I am sure there will be devices for recording from DVD disks to whatever the new media turns out to be.
And, when the mini DV camcorders finally go, I or my kids will have to convert the old tapes to something else so that all our movies will be saved in the new format.

For now, I make 5 copies of every DVD I burn: 1 for us, 1 for each of my 2 kids, 1 'extra' stored in a different room, and 1 for our safe-deposit box. The edited mini DV tapes are in the other room as well, and the raw mini DV tapes are in another place at home. I also make disk images of all my iDVD projects as backups in case the DVD disks become lost or damaged, so I can easily burn another copy of my projects. Even though each disk image itself is 4 GB or less, I have nearly 400GB of disk images on my external drive!

When I am gone, my kids and eventually the grandkids will have to be the keepers of the family video archives. It will be the same for all of us. We can only hope that the future generations appreciate our valiant efforts to preserve our family histories for them, and will treasure them and want to continue to keep them!

The digital age was supposed to make things easier, but this thread illustrates that keeping what you've got is getting harder all the time.

I recently finished scanning my parents 35mm slide collection that went back to 1957. The "media" is still in great condition, Kodachrome 25 has superb longevity, and it can still be "read" with basic equipment. The scanned photos are now backed up on DVD as data files and in multiple places but I think in another 50 years it would be hard to pick up one of those discs and read the jpegs.

It just goes to show that once you have entered the digital age you have to actively manage your data to keep it valid - an archive is an active not passive thing.

In a study a little while ago NASA estimated that they had lost over 75% of the data from the original moon missions. This was not just from tapes flaking oxide but also from losses during system migrations, file type changes and upgrades.

One more note to summarize all of the good comments in this thread. If you want to preserve your digital data indefinitely, you must think 'format conversion'. We can all learn a lesson from NASA's mistakes, and make sure that any digital data we wish to preserve for the future is always available in a currently viable format. The good news is that the pace of change seems to be slowing down, so the amount of time that an old format overlaps with a new format is stretched out a bit.

You may say that Graham, but I have just had problems opening iDVD4 files in iDVD7! I had to go back to my old system and software and re-generate archive files that I could then transfer. So the other lesson is that if you really want to maintain access to those old files, keep the old computer and sofware!