Preferred format for homevideo archive?

[bb]

Which is your preferred format for archiving your home videos?

bb

[theReal]

DV :)

For viewing, any of the above - depending on what is appropriate.
For archiving, I think nothing beats the quality and durability of a DV tape.

[ulfschack]

I don't think DV - tapes have been around long enough for me to verify the durability. Analog information laying in layers upon layers doesn't sound very durable to me.

On the other hand we know that some CD-Rs are destroyed if exposed to light. My friend lost half his collection over the summer. Allthough the discs were in their cases the CD-rack was too close to the window.

Some DVD-manufacturers claim 30 - 100 years durability. Sounds great, but salesmen ... about as far as I throw the fockers.

To conclude: I never can seem to rid the uneasy feeling that all my work will be for naught someday ... That's why I have copies of my productions all over town for anyone remotly interested in seeing my two-year-old doing what two-year-olds do ... for hours.

cheers

[theReal]

On the other hand we know that some CD-Rs are destroyed if exposed to light. My experience is that 90% of all CDRs that are not Mitsui, Tayo Yuden or Kodak (who recently stopped making CDRs, btw) will be dead or almost dead after 3-4 years - without light or heat, just by lying in a dry, cool place in a jewel-case...

And even Mitsui CDRs are better, who wants to believe their 200 or even 1000 years durability (for Mitsui Gold) claims? I give them 15-20 and maybe 30 years for the Gold, but that's it.
Somehow a magnetic tape seems to me not that bad compared to an unbelievably thin layer of organic dye ;)

The good thing about digital media is that you can copy the contents to new media every now and then, hopefully before anything gets destroyed :)

[ulfschack]

Agreed. But I still have worries for dv-tapes. In the old days analog tapes simply got worse, more noisy with time, whereas for DAT there certainly is a threshold under which the ECC will fail and the whole lot of it will be useless ... sorta like when a crappy CD gets light/warmth - dammaged; It's either all or nothing. This is where analogue techniques are vastly superior if you accept the lower quality.

[jotte_ct]

How about the new M$ Media Encoder 9 (MPEG4)?
I think it has pretty good results and it will be an important "player" very soon.

[theReal]

I hope that all my DV tapes will still be intact by the time when I can just copy them 1:1 on an advanced DVD disc (that is not invented yet). Something like 10 tapes on one 80mm disc :D

[ulfschack]

TheReal - That day will come for sure, question is when :)

[matzed]

Fyi, i read somewhere (don't remember where) that the time needed to backup all analog archive things (movies, tv recordings etc) to a digital support (which is supposed to last longer than analog support) will be longer than the time they will begin to die...

My english is not very good : i mean that if we begin now to back up all analog archives that are still readable, it will take so much time that part of those archives will be unreadable...

So...hurry up to backup things !

Matz