There was an advantage with the Extreme IV for me - there was a sweet rebate at the time. :)

One thing that big non-UDMA cards are good for is timelapse. If the interval is long enough, speed isn't that big a deal.

Post your income fromthe last three years and we will let you know. :)

The big UDMA cards aren't bad. The 32gb extreme III is under $200. I'm not going to buy any more non-UDMA cards. I don't think we will see any future video cameras without UDMA. Once the 12 minute duration limit is gone some people will want large storage. I guess that will be something like 2.5 inch drives. I saw a 1 TB 2.5 announced.

I believe Nikon is all UDMA. I expect when Sony gets in the HDSLR biz they will invent a new format, or use memory stick.

I still don't have my archiving of non-tape video down. It's becoming pretty clear to me that I need to dump the raw footage after a period of time - maybe a year. The nice thing about tape was the ability, in the worse case scenario, to go back to raw footage. I don't see using CF cards just one time.

Are you averse to dumping to optical? I know I mention it often, but only because it's working so well for me. My cost per unit is cheaper than tape, and my cost per GB is MUCH cheaper than tape, approx 2:1.

By optical do you mean Blu Ray?

Could be BluRay, could be DVD+DL, could be XDCAM. DVD and BluRay tend to be the cheapest options for optical. But I archive to BluRay and DVD depending on the source and length of the project. If I am archiving a :30 spot, no need to burn a BluRay for that. But if I've got an hour or two of HD, then it makes sense.

How long does it take to burn a 25gb blu-ray disk?
At $85/terrabyte, hard disk storage seems cheaper and easier. That's 40 blu-ray disks. Actually a lot more than 40 disks if the average size of the blu-ray is 10-15gb. That's $85 versus $400-500.
Maybe I'm missing something.

In my case, I'm paranoid about hard drives for reasonably permanent storage of original footage. I've seen too many die.

With Blu Ray, can you put some files on it, burn those and then add to the same disc later, or once it's burned, it's burned like -R DVDs?

Yea, you're missing the fact that unlike Hard drives, BluRay has no moving parts, is not susceptible to being dropped (if it's in a case and/or sleeve), water damage, smoke damage, freezing up, head crashes, etc. Unlike tape and hard drive it cannot be magnetically erased.

Hard drive is certainly cheaper, but a TERRIBLE long-term storage solution. The fewer moving parts the better. Film and Optical have zero. That's a winner in my book.


And I honestly don't remember how long it takes to write a 25GB BluRay, but like CD and DVD before it, times are dropping, and I bought in fairly early. So I have a 2x burner. Every time I order a round of discs, they have faster speeds though.

My Roxio software says yes, you can do multi-session. But like DVD, the disk may not be readable on all players or recorders until it's closed.

I've had plenty of unreadable DVDs, but never had an offline hard drive fail.

I think blu-ray/dvd needs to be verified after creation to be safe. I wonder if 25gb can be burned and verified overnight.

By my calculation duplicate hard drives would still be less expensive than blu-ray. Although I don't know what blu-ray costs in bulk.
I assume there are bad burns like cd/dvd.

My software does a verification by default. And yes, I generally run it overnight. Or at least as I am leaving work. I generally put data on bluray and not videos so the verification process is important to me.

I've never had a bad bluray burn. The burn process is more robust than that for CD/DVD. With built in correction for bad spots on discs, etc. I don't buy my BluRay in bulk, but current pricing for my order next week is $2.60 per disk. I am now seeing 50GB disks for under $20 each. My last order of these was $27.99 around Christmas, and my first order was $47.99 June '08. I'd say that a price cut of more than half in 14 months is pretty fair progress.