Archiving?

[Gary Harper]

On another post, David Newman asked why someone would want to archive back to tape. I have always understoon that tape is the best archiving media... I also am having trouble recording an m2t file back to tape, with Aspect 4 and P/Pro 1.5. Good video, but audio dropouts. The m2t file plays and sounds fine thru the VLC Player... So then what are the alternative archiving solutions? I would like, once that the project is off my system, to be able to make aditional SD DVD's and m2t Data DVD's, without having to reload media and EDL to accomplish this task.
Thanks,
Gary

[Gary Harper]

Waiting for comments or info. Thanks

[David Newman]

Not up to me. I don't archive in M2T, I don't archive to tape, I archive is CFHD AVI on Hard drive (which will last on the shelf much longer than tape and it is in the long run cheaper too.) Consider -- $100 will get you 300GB drive -- $4 will get you 13GB DV tape. The Gigs per dollar are about the same (HD 3GB per $1 and DV 3.25GB per $1). Yet the hard drive includes the heads, whereas you DV tape does not, so you have to factor in the head replacements on your DV/HDV deck/camera. Hard drive wins on price. And it also wins on speed 30MB/s vs 3MB/s, and on shelf storage -- one 3.5" drive is smaller than 23 DV tapes. The hard drive can be placed in a fault tolerant RAID, for increased data security.

There is no good reason today for DV tape archiving.

[Laurence Kingston]

The way I do it is to capture in HDVSplit and archive the original split M2T files on DVD-R, dual layer if it's a lot of files.

I then batch convert them to Cineform using ConnectHD. It seems to work well.

[Richard Leadbetter]

Another hard disk archiver here - external USB 2.0 320GB drives are becoming ludicrously cheap. I also love the supreme levels of flexibility - I can review 720p/60 CineForm AVIs straight from the disk over the USB cable, which has proved to be very useful as we're currently in the process of redeveloping our website and I'm taking stills from our captures.

[Christopher Glaeser]

Originally Posted by Laurence Kingston

The way I do it is to capture in HDVSplit and archive the original split M2T files on DVD-R, dual layer if it's a lot of files. I then batch convert them to Cineform using ConnectHD. It seems to work well.

HDLink can do this in one step. It does capture, scene detection, and generates both the m2t files and avi files, all in one pass.

Best,
Christopher

[Laurence Kingston]

Originally Posted by Christopher Glaeser

HDLink can do this in one step. It does capture, scene detection, and generates both the m2t files and avi files, all in one pass.

Best,
Christopher

Not quite. It produces one long m2t file vs HDVSplits many scene split m2t files. This is important because if convert that one long m2t file, it won't split it into scenes like it did when you captured directly from tape.

[Christopher Glaeser]

Originally Posted by Laurence Kingston

Not quite. It produces one long m2t file vs HDVSplits many scene split m2t files. This is important because if convert that one long m2t file, it won't split it into scenes like it did when you captured directly from tape.

Not for me it doesn't. HDLink splits both the m2t and avi files.

Best,
Christopher

[Laurence Kingston]

Sorry, I thought you were talking about HDConnect (which doesn't split an already captured m2t). Does HDLink do this?

[David Moody]

I am using P/Pro 1.5 with an earlier version of Aspect and have not noticed audio dropouts yet.

The reason I go back to tape is to use the camera to play back edited video in high def. on other peoples TV's. I will also have an additional backup if I have a hard drive crash since I am using a 4 drive Raid 0

[Christopher Glaeser]

Originally Posted by Laurence Kingston

Does HDLink do this?

Yes, HDLink can capture, scene split, convert, and create m2t files and avi files in a single pass.

Best,
Christopher

[Laurence Kingston]

What I'm looking for is for HDLink to be able to scene split Cineform avis from an archived m2t file.

[Dave Campbell]

David, you have really thrown me a curve ball. I was already to buy the new Sony deck. But, at the price it costs, could I be better to archive on hard drives? Darn, if I just had a money tree.

Dave

[Steven Gotz]

Laurence,

HDLink will easily split up a M2T into individual Cineform AVIs. It just won't split up the M2T into smaller M2T files.

I want it to capture scene detected M2T files like HSVSplit. Then convert the ones we want to convert.

[Lauri Kettunen]

Originally Posted by David Newman

Not up to me. I don't archive in M2T, I don't archive to tape, I archive is CFHD AVI on Hard drive

David, it's obvious that you archive in CFHD avi, but for people outside CF, the situation is less clear. I mean, if all the material shot is archived in CFHD avi, then one's all business becomes also CF dependent.

In my case, I make wildlife shooting (mainly with XL H1), and the HD material needs to be useful for years, or say, for a decade or two. So, if I archive CFHD files, then I also wanted to know the codec will be there in the future.

Just recently, my system disk had some sort of problem, and consequently, in the end of the day I had to format the disc and install WinXP all programs -including Cineform stuff- from scratch. While installing the machine, I discovered, the system ID had changed and I was not able to install CF software with the existing activation key. (I sent a ticket to CF support, and the issue was nicely resolved. Thanks for that.) This incidence made me to realize how dependent I'll become on CF support, if everything is archived in CFHD avi (which technically still is, also in my view, the best option).

So, could you seriously think of this archiving issue? Eventually, from the user's point of view, it's not tempting to become fully dependent on the support, when something unexpectedly gets wrong. (Especially so, if one is in hurry, and things fail during the weekend, when nobody is there in the support.) Besides, in computer and software business everything seems to be in a rapid and constant change. In the worst case, the people behind the development team change and the new people have quite different goals.