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Archiving DV

post #1 of 6
12/29/01 at 8:04am
Thread Starter 
My folks are getting into Mac-centric DV - they have a nice mid-range DV camera, a 2000 iMac (500MHz, 128MB), and a new CD-RW. The question is, what is the best way to archive the DV footage with highest convenience and least loss of quality?

I tried burning VideoCD's from iMovie via Toast, and wasn't terribly impressed with the quality, although you can't beat the compression (about 10 MB per minute of video).

Keeping the original DV footage on the DV tapes (or exporting directly from iMovie to DV tapes) is another option, but it'll get expensive to keep buying new DV tapes.

Burning the original footage to CD's isn't too practical, since uncompressed it eats about 200 MB/minute.

Anyone have any suggestions for a good, high-quality archiving method? Something that would let me fit about 15 minutes of DV onto a CD (so...40 MB/min?) with minimal artifacts?
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post #2 of 6
12/29/01 at 11:02am
Well, nearly all video codecs are lossy; so, you're gonna have to forfeit a little quality somewhere. However, I've had great results with Soreson 3 and 3ivx Delta on high quality. You ought to try them both.

See <a href="http://www.3ivx.com" target="_blank">http://www.3ivx.com</a> for 3ivx Delta.
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post #3 of 6
12/29/01 at 11:05am
Well I tend to print my FCP movies back to DV tape for backups. However if you do want to back it up to CD you could try using sorenson 3 codec for QuickTime, its pretty good. (Although you would need QuickTime Pro to do it, but compresson does take a while so keep that in mind.)

Are you just trying to archive your finished/cut iMovie? or all the clips you used in it as well? And remember to buy DV tapes in bunched online to save costs.

Mike
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post #4 of 6
12/29/01 at 2:01pm
just buy a lot of DV tapes and put the footage back on the tapes.

It is lossless and then you can have them forever at superb quality!

word out holmes :cool:
My Syte
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My Syte
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post #5 of 6
12/29/01 at 3:36pm
Yep, using DV tapes is the absolute cheapest and highest quality way to archive DV footage.

The drawback is you can't copy your imovie movie file with all of the edits, clips, dissolves etc.

Perhaps your parents should look at a DVD-RW drive. If they are really getting into doing video stuff, they'd probably like the ability to put their video onto DVDs for playback as well as the ability to store media files on DVD as data for backup. A blank DVD costs about as much as a blank DV tape.
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post #6 of 6
12/29/01 at 5:12pm
Thread Starter 
Thanks for the advice. It seems like DV tapes are the best bet. At about 8 bucks a pop, it's probably more cost-effective than CDs would be anyway. We can just keep seperate master archives and iMovie archives. I'll play around a little with the iMovie codecs to see if I can get better quality on a vCD (at least for distribution purposes), but tapes are probably the way to go.
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