I use DV and am planning to upgrade to an HD Camcorder, with HDV being my preferred format. I am used to capturing a whole tape at once, quality sounds like its the best available and I like the idea of having all my footage archived on Tape. Too many drive failures I've heard of, plus one of my own.
Anyway, aside from having the original tapes stored, I also want to archive the source material to a hard drive, to protect against the potential for MiniDV tape drives becoming extinct. What would be the best format ?? I'm thinking M2T as it is the original raw data stream and only takes up about 13GB per hour as opposed to AIC's 30GB.
I gather it is difficult to work with M2T on a Mac, although there are ways to use ClipWrap or MPEG Streamclip to convert it into useable material. I use iMovie06, have iMovie08 and FCE, none of which I believe work natively with HDV material, although somehow I did save some footage as MT2 previously although I've no idea how I did it ??
So .........
1. Would M2T be a good format for archiving HDV material (in addition to the original tapes)
2. Can I easily work with MT2 files through some conversion / repackaging utilities ? Quality is required but not paramount, ie this is for home use so some minor loss of quality is perfectly acceptable.
3. How do you save the original data stream as MT2 using iMovie or FCE or Quicktime - Or how do you think I did it before ??? I certainly have it on my hard drive and am not sure how I did it.
4. Do Time Codes and associated data get saved and transferred when moving this material around ?
many thanks
Guy
Anyway, aside from having the original tapes stored, I also want to archive the source material to a hard drive, to protect against the potential for MiniDV tape drives becoming extinct. What would be the best format ?? I'm thinking M2T as it is the original raw data stream and only takes up about 13GB per hour as opposed to AIC's 30GB.
I gather it is difficult to work with M2T on a Mac, although there are ways to use ClipWrap or MPEG Streamclip to convert it into useable material. I use iMovie06, have iMovie08 and FCE, none of which I believe work natively with HDV material, although somehow I did save some footage as MT2 previously although I've no idea how I did it ??
So .........
1. Would M2T be a good format for archiving HDV material (in addition to the original tapes)
2. Can I easily work with MT2 files through some conversion / repackaging utilities ? Quality is required but not paramount, ie this is for home use so some minor loss of quality is perfectly acceptable.
3. How do you save the original data stream as MT2 using iMovie or FCE or Quicktime - Or how do you think I did it before ??? I certainly have it on my hard drive and am not sure how I did it.
4. Do Time Codes and associated data get saved and transferred when moving this material around ?
many thanks
Guy