The Panny-Pro Mini-DV tapes are about $7 an hour, and required the camera for playback. I was thining about re-recording them rather than archiving on tape. But, I guess I would need to transfer to the HD on my Mac, or a peripheral drive. Or, should I do some editing and then burn a DVD as my video archiving media. Right now I'm thinking about Christmas footage, kids parties and stuff like that. Later, maybe the footage from creative projects.

Thanks...

I would say go with DVD, it's the best archive medium right now. A good DVD-R will last for years without any maintenance required as long as it's kept in a case. DV tape would preserve the quality, you'd just have to watch out for tape stretch and all that nasty stuff (it's recommonded to fast forward and rewind your tapes every few months to prevent stretching). Hard drive would be an excellent choice if you were to use it only for archiving and not have it hooked up to your computer all the time (a firewire external would be great for this).

mini-DV tape is the cheapest. Leave your material on there and burn your project files + music + titles onto a CD. You can recreate your project later.

Hard drive is the most convenient, and getting pretty cheap nowadays. Just don't keep the hard drive running because moving parts will fail. Look out for hot deals on sites like fatwallet.com.

DV tape should be something like $5 from taperesources.com, depending if you live in the US or not and in which state.

DVD-Rs don't last forever. The cheapest CD-Rs fail in just a few years. DV tape should last at least 15 years (comparing it to a similar format).

When you capture your footage and edit a program, you make an edited master back to tape. You can always make a backup too. Then you file the backup with your original tapes and burn a CD of the project files. That way you can always batch capture and re-create the show at a later date. Your original tapes should always be filed carefully. That's all you really need. Going to DVD would only introduce another level of compression and lower your quality from the original DV. When DV25 starts to disappear in the future, you can always clone your tapes and master to whatever the format du jour may be.