I realize that this thread may be slightly out of place, as it could also fit in "Peripherals," or the photo/video threads, but this subforum is most likely to have viewers who will be interested in this.
The relative merits of Blu-ray and associated elements have been discussed to death, but I thought it was worth describing my experience with my burner.
I've got a few finished video editing projects sitting on my hard drive, small jobs I did for people and got paid for that I no longer need, but might want to keep around just in case. But there's no easy way to back-up to disc, and I want it available in the native edited form, aside from on tape, in case I ever need it later. I could potentially re-encode it.
I got an LG-GGW-H20L for $205 on sale, and it came with a BD-RE. Using this, I was able to back up a project to disk by using Final Cut's Media Manager, exporting media and a project file to the disc, or alternatively to a burn folder, then using the finder's burn method to send it out. It worked more or less perfectly, though file names can't be too long or your media will become disconnected, as the end of the name will be garbled. I suppose there's a cap on file size name, which is reasonable. It's a disc, after all. But that said, it even reads/writes reasonably fast for what it is, and it turns out to be a much better long term solution for putting these projects. Now, discs at $3.60/disc at their cheapest are not exactly the easiest pill to swallow, but I can fit two one-hour SD projects on one disc, which is pretty handy.
Blu-ray may not be the most popular thing in the world, but I've found its data capacity to make it an acceptable long-term back-up solution. Better than keeping it all on hard drives; even if HDDs are cheaper by the gig, failure rates, among other things, make their use as stored, semipermanent back-up impractical. $3.60 per disc is worth it, and they'll get cheaper.
The relative merits of Blu-ray and associated elements have been discussed to death, but I thought it was worth describing my experience with my burner.
I've got a few finished video editing projects sitting on my hard drive, small jobs I did for people and got paid for that I no longer need, but might want to keep around just in case. But there's no easy way to back-up to disc, and I want it available in the native edited form, aside from on tape, in case I ever need it later. I could potentially re-encode it.
I got an LG-GGW-H20L for $205 on sale, and it came with a BD-RE. Using this, I was able to back up a project to disk by using Final Cut's Media Manager, exporting media and a project file to the disc, or alternatively to a burn folder, then using the finder's burn method to send it out. It worked more or less perfectly, though file names can't be too long or your media will become disconnected, as the end of the name will be garbled. I suppose there's a cap on file size name, which is reasonable. It's a disc, after all. But that said, it even reads/writes reasonably fast for what it is, and it turns out to be a much better long term solution for putting these projects. Now, discs at $3.60/disc at their cheapest are not exactly the easiest pill to swallow, but I can fit two one-hour SD projects on one disc, which is pretty handy.
Blu-ray may not be the most popular thing in the world, but I've found its data capacity to make it an acceptable long-term back-up solution. Better than keeping it all on hard drives; even if HDDs are cheaper by the gig, failure rates, among other things, make their use as stored, semipermanent back-up impractical. $3.60 per disc is worth it, and they'll get cheaper.
