The
Big Question:
What is the best way to
archive or save my Home Movie transfers? Is Mini-DV Tape, DVDs or
a Hard Drive the best way to go?
Answer:
The are couple of reasons
that a Hard Drive is a far better solution then a DVD or Mini-DV Tape
for archiving
First off both DVD and Mini-DV Tapes use compression to store the
information on the tape or disc. At this point it is unknown how long
DVDs will last. The estimates for DVDs go from 5 years-100 years.
They just haven’t been around long enough to be sure.
Mini-DV Tapes on the other
hand have been around since the mid-90’s and have been found to have
quite a few issues In general they can be surprisingly fragile; there
are so many ways to break them and make them impossible to watch;
they can become crunched or wrinkled in your camera as you are trying
to capture them to your hard drive and cannot be restored; excessive
heat or humidity can cause the tape to get stuck together.
As far as DVDs there is
a lot less storage capability on a DVD disc then there is on a comparable
hard drive. To give you an example the typical DVD with 2 hours of
your Home Movies takes up only 4.7 GB of space on the disc. The same
2 hours on a hard drive will take up nearly 27 GB of space. As a result
of the compression on the DVD some of the quality and resolution of
the original is lost and also reduces the ability to edit your material
later on.
I believe in the not to
distant future, new formats will be available that will offer considerably
better resolution than that of today’s DVDs or Mini-DV tapes. The
good news is that you will be able to upgrade to these formats if
your movies are archived on a hard drive. On the other hand, it’s
difficult to get optimum results once it is compressed to a DVD.
So if in the future you
think you may be interested in editing your movies by changing the
order of your films, adding a voice over or music, it would be very
difficult to get the best results by trying to edit a DVD. The best
solution is to get both. There is no substitute for the convenience
of a DVD, and getting your master on a hard drive will not affect
the overall cost of the transfer.
As a matter of fact if you say you read it here I’ll include the additional
transfer to your hard drive for FREE!
Question:
Do the DVD recorders available
for sale really work?
Answer:
They certainly do and
represent an excellent value for the “do it yourselfer” who plans
to watch the DVD that they create at home using the recorder as a
DVD player. However, you do need to be aware of the problem of incompatibility
between DVD players. DVD’s that you create may be incompatible with
a wide range of DVD players made by other manufacturers. Your home
created DVD’s may also be incompatible with different formats such
as DVD-R/DVD+R.
To further complicate
things, different DVD blank media, which you will need to create your
DVD, may or may not be compatible with the DVD recorder or the DVD
player that you purchased. You see these units were made for people
to record their favorite TV shows for later viewing and it isn’t necessary
for the discs that are created to be compatible with other DVD players.
If you plan to have a few discs available to give to family members
to watch on different DVD players, then this may not be the best solution.
It may work and then again it may not.
 |
|
 |
|