Dubbing HDV Tapes

[Macmaniac]

Howdy folks.

I am shooting a documentary on a Sony Z1U in HDV 1080i and I am piling up 63 minute tapes. When I am done with the documentary I want to make copies of all my original source tapes and dump them on to 276 minute HDV tapes such as this one. http://www.bhphotovideo.com/c/produ...DM_Digital_Master_Videocassette.html#features
My school has a couple of HVR-M25Us and I was thinking of dubbing the HDV tapes over firewire. I was curious if anyone has done this and if they noticed any degradation in quality?

HDV has been a fun format to work with and I am really impressed with the results. When its lit well it looks amazing. My partner and I played our footage on a 57in Sony flatscreen and were blown away.

 

[-DH]

>>I was thinking of dubbing the HDV tapes over firewire. I was curious if anyone has done this and if they noticed any degradation in quality?<<

Dubbing via Firewire is merely a digital data transfer; 1s and 0s. There should be no degradation.

-DH

 

[bigbossbmb]

I'd strongly recommend sticking with 63min tapes and using identical tape names to the original... this way you can batch capture your project from the backups after you take the media offline.

going to larger cassettes will give you TC problems which makes it a pointless backup.

 

[LethalWolfe]

'Wide mouth' decks are also much less common than cameras/decks that take the MiniDV size tapes so finding a way to play the tapes back down the road would be more difficult.


Lethal

 

[huntercr]

Howdy folks.

I am shooting a documentary on a Sony Z1U in HDV 1080i and I am piling up 63 minute tapes. When I am done with the documentary I want to make copies of all my original source tapes and dump them on to 276 minute HDV tapes such as this one. http://www.bhphotovideo.com/c/produ...DM_Digital_Master_Videocassette.html#features
My school has a couple of HVR-M25Us and I was thinking of dubbing the HDV tapes over firewire. I was curious if anyone has done this and if they noticed any degradation in quality?

HDV has been a fun format to work with and I am really impressed with the results. When its lit well it looks amazing. My partner and I played our footage on a 57in Sony flatscreen and were blown away.

I'm probably not realizing the possible negatives to this, but have you considered just dumping them to Harddrive? USB2 external 1TB drives are down to $99 now... you can fit approximately 20 276 minute tapes on a 1TB harddrive. ( or 86 miniDV tapes )

I'm sure there are downsides to this... anyone want to chime in? Since I'm just a hobbiest, I really don't know.

 

[LethalWolfe]

Hard drives have a tendency to die, especially if left sitting on a shelf for long periods of time, so I would only archive to hard drives in mirrored pairs and w/a routine in place to periodically spin up the drives to confirm they are still working.


Lethal

 

[Macmaniac]

Thanks for the thoughts folks.

I am using several Hard Drives to back all of my data up, but these large format tapes will be used mostly to be donated to various media libraries. Hard drives are not suitable for long term historical preservation, tapes are much more stable for long term storage.

Our project is partly a historical preservation, some of the footage was on 16mm color film, and much of the older content we are dealing with is degrading (film especially). The sad reality of the archives is that there are literally tons of film stock rotting away in archives.

The photos we have scanned were in much better condition because of the stock they were printed on, sadly slides have already begun degrading after 30 years.

The 276 minute tapes is mostly out of convenience to the archives we are donating to. We want to minimize the number of tapes they have to deal with.

Thanks for the thoughts.