I have 30 mini DV tapes of raw footage - should its backup be on mini DV or hard disk?

Question

We just finished shooting a low budget indie feature on mini DV. We will edit it in Final Cut Pro. I want to take the best quality backup possible - is there a reason to take it on mini DV tapes as opposed to hard disk? Also, if we go with the hard disk option, what are the various formats in which we can take our backup?

Answer 1

Holy crap! 30 tapes? You need approx. 540 GB of storage, then some more for editing.

You'd need a lot of hard drive space. How do you plan on editing without the entire collection of tapes on a hard drive, at the same time?

For the best quality, you are looking at about 18GB per tape (Just a guess from my experience - and I never fill a tape to the exact end either, I pop a tape in at a convient time). That is, if you save the tapes as RAW uncompressed AVI files. This is the best for real-time editing, being that the editor does not need to uncompress the clips during the process, which in turn gives you instant play-back in the editor.

Ulead MediaStudio Pro is a good editor too. It is professional and does everything.

Answer 2

Tapes are probably your best option. They're cheap, rugged, and your footage is on them already. Hard drives are an option, but they are not a very good option because to store 30 tapes, you would need a HUGE hard drive, which would be expensive, not to mention information technology changes rather quickly, and in a several years, you might not be able to access your files unless you transfer them again. BTW, I'm just curious, is there a place where I could see your film once it's finished? I'm into filmmaking as well, so I'm interested in taking a look at other people's work for some inspiration. Anyways, hope this helps!

-----EDIT-----
Mr. Spin, if the video was uncompressed, the file would be 5 times bigger. Then 30 tapesx12 GB/tapex5 times for uncompressed would = 1.8 terabytes. I'd say you would need a pretty big (or several pretty big) hard drive to hold that.

Answer 3

You will need a BIG hard drive to use for back up. An hour of mini dv footage will use up about 13 GB of hard drive space. Since you are going to edit all the footage you might as well get an external drive that has enough space to transfer to and edit in.