What format do you suggest for storing "old" DV tapes?

[sarge]

Wired had a great article earlier this month on the topic:

http://www.wired.com/2015/07/film-preservation/

Videotape preservation is a different beast, and often a much more straightforward and automated one. This becomes clear the moment you enter the Packard video room. Lined with every tape playing machine known to man—including one-inch machines, Digibeta, Betamax, DVCAM, and Hi8—this is where it all comes to be digitized. I can see an episode of Judge Hatchett playing on a small screen above one of these machines, while four SAMMA robots in the corner gorge themselves on ¾-inch and VHS tapes. The latter automated system runs all the time and has already digitized well over 500,000 television and video items.

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[phrehdd]

More peanuts from the gallery...

In general, hard drives are cheap. They are a fine place to store your files and as some have stated, redundancy or multiple copies makes a great deal of sense here.

CD, DVD and Blue Ray. Contrary to what is stated, they can be used as there are a few select makers that offer the discs with intent to store as in "archival discs." When the newer M-disc (50 gigs and perhaps larger) are made to be archival then we really have something truly excellent to work with. The key to using archival discs is to have a successive burn plan. This means you may consider once a year burning new discs or every 3 years etc. Though the discs may be intended for 10-20 years and longer, it is about the multiple copy facet as we can't always be sure something will not get damaged or was a defect out the door.

Handbrake and other tools. Sorry guys, I'll never understand why anyone pushes these compression tools. Let me start by saying those that do still photography know that a 16 mp camera normally produced far more information than say a 4mp camera. Both might produce a RAW file that is all the data collected in the image but one has more. Using Handbrake is akin to making a jpeg from a RAW file. - Simply stated, it is a lossy format and thus information is lost and cannot be restored from the jpeg. Similar can be said with using Handbrake (unless you are simply converting the file format only and in that case, there are far better tools). H264 is common for compression and if one is interested in compression with both detail and size in mind of the final file, then some investigation into H265 is in order.

My take - I would try to get the DV files onto a computer with a decent program to handle some edits. Remove all unwanted sections, create a directory with how you want to set up your files (dates, topics etc.) and be ready to transfer to whatever medium you desire. In my case (mostly photo work), I store images 3 ways - single drives, NAS and disc. The discs are kept in a safe cool and secure location off site. I have some discs that are more than 5 years old and are in excellent shape. Then again, I have commercial DVDs that are way more than 5 years old in excellent shape and yes, one disc that was trash in less than 2 years of play. One thing can be said for sure, there is no absolute perfect method of archiving your movies, but its a matter of reducing risk of damage, degradation of the medium simply by time and more.

For now, consider hard drives as a cheap means to an end and pony up a few dollars to get started. Go for 2 drives if you can.

 

[sarge]

I think the moving image archive community recommends JPEG2000 as your compression format but as in all things, there is some debate about that:

http://blogs.loc.gov/digitalpreservation/2013/01/is-jpeg-2000-a-preservation-risk/

http://www.digitalpreservation.gov/formats/fdd/video_fdd.shtml

For storage mediums multiple hard drives in different locations will suffice, but anyone shooting in volume (or accumulating those bits over time) will probably need to transition to a tape based solution i.e. LTO. In either case, both solutions require you to migrate your collection at regular intervals - unlike film, which we know can last over one hundred years if stored (and processed) properly...with the added benefit that it does not require any specialized apparatus or software to view the content contained on it.

Probably way more than anyone wants to know, but here is an interesting article about LTO migration project at WGBH in Boston:

http://blogs.loc.gov/digitalpreserv...er-challenges-at-wgbh-an-ndsr-project-update/

It'll be interesting to see how much of what we're generating now will still be around in 50 years....

 

[LethalWolfe]

- I then used handbrake to convert the raw captures down to a smaller size - I found that mini DV format is actually 59.94 frames per second interlaced, and this was evidenced by my first conversions being choppy compared to the original from the raw captures.

Minor correction here. Color NTSC DV is 29.97 interlaced frames per second and each frame is made up of two fields (each field makes up half the image on alternating, horizontal lines). One field is drawn and then 1/60th of a second later the second field is drawn. Thanks to the decay rate of the phosphors in the display and the Persistence of Vision phenomenon the two half images appear as a single frame to our eye.

If you converted the footage into 30p then it would appear choppy because you cut the temporal resolution in half (instead of a field being drawn every 1/60 of a second you have a whole frame being drawn every 1/30th of a second).