Archiving Dv Footage for Future Use

[Steven1621]

I recently converted all my parent's VHS home videos into Dv using iMovie. I now have over 100 GB of video. At somepoint in the future, I want to edit and burn a lot of it to DVD, but now I need to keep it on the hard drive. Is there anything I can do to compress it down to something smaller while still preserving the raw footage?

 

[LethalWolfe]

I recently converted all my parent's VHS home videos into Dv using iMovie. I now have over 100 GB of video. At somepoint in the future, I want to edit and burn a lot of it to DVD, but now I need to keep it on the hard drive. Is there anything I can do to compress it down to something smaller while still preserving the raw footage?

I suppose you could try using something like Stuff It to apply data compression to the files (so you end up w/ ".sit" files). Your best bet though is to record the footage onto MiniDV tape.


Lethal

 

[Espnetboy3]

The more you compress and uncompress video footage the more bits of data you will loose. So in the end the raw footage will not be the same quality. It already being vhs I wouldnt do this becuase the quality isnt that great to begin with.

 

[alex_ant]

DV is already compressed. You could try a very-high-compression format like bzip2, but it probably wouldn't do much. Probably be best just to back all 100 gigs of it up, either onto DV tape or an external HD that you can store away.

 

[Rod Rod]

I agree with the others - archiving to DV tape would be best, outside of transferring it all to another hard drive. I suppose the difference will be 7-8 hours of work now, and 7-8 hours of work later (archiving then retrieving), compared to getting a 120GB or bigger hard drive and spending about 40 minutes or so on the file transfer. A 120-160GB external FireWire hard drive should cost around $100 or less if you build your own.

Another (much less attractive but way cheaper $ wise and way more costly time wise) option would be to span the 100GB of data across about 24 single-layer DVD-Rs. The only program I know of that can do that is Backup, which comes with .Mac. There should be other apps that do the same thing but I'm not aware of them.