High Speed copy of miniDV tapes

[Ashraff Shah]

Is there any equipment available to make a copy of miniDV tape at high speed?
Would like to have a work copy of tape available and an intact master stored safely.

[Richard Alvarez]

None that I am aware of. The increased speed of the tape heads (because of the increased transport speed of the tape) would be outrageously high for the small tolerance allowed in the tracking bands.

[Jeff Pulera]

Videotape uses a spinning head (9000 rpm for DV) that writes helical tracks across the tape diagonally, unlike audio cassettes that simply move the tape across a stationary head, so no such thing as high-speed dubbing for DV. Connect 2 cameras/decks via 1394 and do it real time, that is the option.

The other option is to just capture the files to the computer and save the files on an external drive, will take same amount of time either way.

Jeff Pulera
Safe Harbor Computers

Originally Posted by Ashraff Shah

Is there any equipment available to make a copy of miniDV tape at high speed?
Would like to have a work copy of tape available and an intact master stored safely.

[David Sholle]

Originally Posted by Ashraff Shah

Is there any equipment available to make a copy of miniDV tape at high speed?
Would like to have a work copy of tape available and an intact master stored safely.

I believe that many years ago there were Sony professional DV/miniDV decks that could ingest at double speed and quad speed. Two could presumably dub at those speeds. I seem to remember that they were priced in the multi $10K range, though, and are probably no longer on the market.

I don't work with miniDV much anymore, but not that long ago, I ingested all of my tapes into a NLE and stored on hard drives. Bare 2 TB drives are going for about $150 or less, so that is $0.075 per GB, which is cheaper than buying blank tapes. I keep a backup hard drive at another location for safety. So I have the original tape, and two identical copies on two separate hard drives. The additional advantage is that the footage is always available instantly for NLE use.

Also, when I ingested them into the NLE, I also used a standalone DVD recorder to make a DVD copy for good measure.

[Shaun Roemich]

Good memory, David. The DSR60 could be equipped with QSDI which allowed quad speed transfers (I BELIEVE intended for news style linear A-B and A-A roll edit suites). I don't think this ever really caught on and I haven't heard anything about it in around 8 or so years.

And transfer was over SDI terminals.