Best way to backup and store

[Jose Skaf]

I don´t know much about compression so i got a question. I whant to store all my video work in the best quality posible (for future copies). Almost all is shot on the DVX, edited in Avid and outputed for DVD or similar. I was told the best way to do it is keeping it on DV, and that the best thing is QT DV. Is this correct? Is there any other way to store my work with the best quality possible?
Thanks in advance.

[Rob Lohman]

Don't re-encode it. I assume when you shot the footage it was onto miniDV
tape. If so, keep that tape as your master. I usually also capture the complete
tape (and have it auto break up the files whenever I pressed stop/start) and
burn a couple of data (!) DVD's with the in my case DV AVI files.

If you are on the Mac you will capture in DV QuickTime which you can also
burn onto a data (!) DVD.

Video DVD is what your settop DVD player understands and requires the footage
to be in a special compression format called MPEG-2 and special layout. This is
a nice system for final delivery but not storage of your original footage.

[George Ellis]

Which Avid? In Liquid, if you label the tapes well and log them correctly, you can backup a project with or without keeping the logged media. If you do it without the media, you batch digitize the media when you restore the project. With the media (and you can save the render), it can be larger.

As for backup, the second cheapest, next to the orginal tapes, is becoming hard drives. External storage is dropping below $1 a Gigabyte. You can get 250GB externals for less than $150 too. I have 3 now ;)

[David Tamés]

Originally Posted by George Ellis

As for backup, the second cheapest, next to the orginal tapes, is becoming hard drives. External storage is dropping below $1 a Gigabyte. [...]

Or maybe DVD-R?

If the material you're backing up is really valuable, and you want to make sure you can read it many years from now, hard drives, standard DVDs, and videotape are all problematic. None are considered good archival mediums. Hard drives are a problem due to their electro-mechanical nature, anything with electronics and moving parts is bound to fail at some time. While RAIDs can be set up so failure of one or two disks will not affect the integrity of the RAID set, this starts to get expensive in terms of hardware. Standard DVDs are problematic because they are prone to problems caused by oxidation of the reflective layer, delamination, and fading of the recording dye. LTO tape back up systems are expensive, and the longevity of the tape may be an issue. Blu-Ray is just now entering the market, but the longevity issues are not well known at this time. What's an archivist to do?

Here's something that might make video archivists sleep a little better at night. MAM-A (formerly known as Mitsui) makes "Gold Archive Grade" recordable DVD-R and DVD+R media. The reflective layer of these disks is made of 24 karat gold, which provides better resistance to chemical breakdown. The use of andphthalocyanine recording dye offers better resistant to fading. In addition, the disks are held together with a high quality bonding agent (DVDs are made of two polycarbonate disck bonded together). The long-term stability of the reflective layer, the dye, and the integrity of the laminated disks are crucial in order for the disks to be readable in the future.

While it may be tedious archiving lots of video files to 4.7GB disks, currently this provides one of the most stable and cost-effective storage solutions at around $0.40/GB for the media (when purchasing spindles of 50 disks). Much has been written on this topic, if preserving media is important, it's worth the time investigating long term storage options and their pros and cons.