Achive

[Dennis Cummins]

Guys just wondering what way you archive your weddings? My external hard drive is about to burst and I don’t fancy buying a new one. If I burn the weddings on to a DVD can/how do I then extract it if I ever need to re-edit it??

Any other suggestions are very welcomed!

[Jimmy McKenzie]

This can be a struggle. I decided that once the edit was complete and the B/G applauded with no edit decision, then the editing job was complete. If ever an extra were required, the duplicate would be made from the dvd.

You could capture from the dvd and re-open that for editing, but at a loss.

To offer a non-harddrive consuming way of archiving the source material all you require are the source tapes, the project file, an edl of captures and names, along with the associated wav files, titles and graphics that will sit with the tapes on one dvd.

Then if ever you need to re-visit the reel for re-edit, you can reconstruct the project. Happily, I have never had to do this.

[Don Bloom]

Archive to DVD then IF you need to go back to it use either a DVD ripper program, DVDDecrypter is a good one, OR play the DVD from a stand alone deck into your computer (depending on your system and hardware you might need to set up a pass thru) and you're all set. Also if the audio is AC3 you might need to convert it to WAV. DVD Audio Extractor works very well for that process.

It been my experience the quality loss is minimal when loading it in however it seems the biggest hit comes when re-encoding the piece BUT it also seems to be fairly minimal.

Don

[Jon Omiatek]

Archiving is on tape. I make a backup of the NLE file, for example Vegas makes a file that stores all of the information you would need as long as you had the video files and other related files used in editing. I capture all the tapes the same way, so if I need to, I could just recapture the tape and use the editor file and I am off to the races. My NLE file will fit on a floppy or CD.

Jon

[Pete Bauer]

The two choices I personally make use of for archiving large amounts are miniDV tape and DV-AVI on writeable DVD.

Export-to-Tape is terrifically convenient for back up, and not really expensive in terms of preserving a copy of material that may be worth hundreds or thousands of dollars, at $5-6 an hour. But it is a bother if you do need to recapture. Properly cared-for tapes last well, but may deteriorate with time and/or may have an occasional drop out. Also, as we approach the era of tapeless video, you may not want to have mega-hours of footage on tape to convert later.

Splitting a program into 20 minute segments of DV AVI and backing them up to writeable DVD is a bit more of a bother, but even cheaper...easily less than $2 an hour by now for the media. The longevity of writeable DVDs is a bit of an open question, but they are completely immune to magnetic flux (really not much of a concern for tapes, but that has happened to people on rare occasion), dust, and fingerprints (but not necessarily scratches). If you need to "recapture" you only have to copy the files back onto your hard drive and the computer need never know they were "missing." No tape required.

One of each, kept in separate locations, would be ideal. Any way you cut it, backup is a bit of a hassle, but ya gotta do something!

[Michael McGruder]

Pulling footage from a prepared DVD is a pain - and the footage won't be as good as the original (unless you opt to save the tapes you use). Anything converted to mpeg-2, and then re-edited won't be as crisp, there maybe some aberrations among other things.

While I realize you really want to avoid hard drives as a backup plan...

I got an ADS Firewire HD enclosure so that I can swap out hard drives whenever I want. With the cost of most hard drives diving well below $50 for an 80GB, in my mind to get a couple hard drives, backup footage and project templates (veg files if you use Sony Vegas) then after a designated period - you can opt to erase and recycle the hard drives for later use.

The enclosure ran me (I want to say) about $60-80. Check to see if you know of anyone who is trying to get rid of their computer. Wipe the hard drives and start anew. Even a 40-60GB hard drive (as what maybe found in some older machines) would be at least 10 times better than a single-layer burn DVD.

Above all else - look to see how you're organize your project. Does your NLE have scene capturing capability? Some programs like Vegas allow you to do scene captures which can break up a video into managable sizes and not as one giant file. If it does - then backing up using DVD's maybe a viable option.

Good luck!
-Michael

[Aanarav Sareen]

Believe or not, I store all my raw footage on DVDs as AVI files. With the cost of good DVDs under $1, I can store about 20 minutes of raw footage on each disc. The cost generally runs about $15 per project.

[Peter Jefferson]

for archiving, raw presentations are printed to tape per hour WITHOUT music..

this allows for greater flexibiliy later on just in case..