Previous Image « » Next Image Click to Enlarge Click to Enlarge

Video Media Archiving

It is winter, a time to reflect and get organized. That box of tapes sitting in your basement has been waiting for this cold blustery day, waiting for you to blow off the dust and save the memories and images filling thousands of feet of shiny black tape. OK, you say, let's go buy a stack of DVDs or perhaps that new terabyte hard drive and begin the archiving process! Whoa! Not so fast. Before you do permanent damage to your life's work, let's take a hard look at archiving. In this article, we will examine the options you have available for archiving your footage and hopefully dispel any misconceptions you may have about this all-important topic. We will take a look at viable options and steps that will help you maintain your video library for years to come.

And there still is... for the time being. When you look in your box of tapes, you are most likely going to find a variety of formats that have existed through the years: VHS, 8mm, S-VHS, Hi8 and the recent additions, Mini DV and perhaps DVCAM and DVCPRO. Amazingly enough, the videotapes you shot twenty years ago will still play, if you have a good-quality player and have stored the tapes correctly. However, if you threw them in a box and stuck them in the basement, you may be disappointed when you finally do try to play them.

Now, let's look at a good news/bad news scenario. The good news is that, if you did store them properly (we'll go over that in a minute) and you have a clean, reliable player, you will probably be in good shape. The bad news is you still need to do some work to make sure you maintain your collection for years to come.

By now, you are probably getting a little impatient: "Tell us about the cool way to use DVDs and hard drives to archive our footage!" Well, let's just put it this way... DVDs and hard drives are not reliable ways to archive your footage. The MPEG-2 compression needed to create DVD-Video discs compresses your video so much that you will lose some of the original quality of the raw footage. It may look fine, but when you attempt to edit the footage into a new project, you will find that the quality is not as good as the original.

You might point out that the DVDs you buy with pristine Hollywood movies look really good. Yes, they do. The primary reason is that discs authored by Hollywood studios are compressed with much more human intervention to get the very best quality out of the master footage. Additionally, Hollywood is making such a huge number of copies that they are able to use a process called replication, where the information is exactly the same as the master and the media used is extremely high-quality and very stable. Your recordable DVDs are not replicated; they are burned. This means the discs themselves are prone to chemical decay over time and are not that stable. Do not use DVDs to archive your footage. You may use them as a reference media - meaning a recording of some footage to show a client what you have, but do not use them for long-term archiving.

So what about hard drives? The problem with your hard drive is not if it will fail but when it will fail (see sidebar at the end of this article). Hard drives are for backup, meaning that you use them to back up your footage, not to store it as an archival master.

If a hard drive or DVD fails, you may lose everything on the drive or disc. However, if a tape fails, you usually lose only a small bit of information.

OK then, what about Flash media? Currently, the amount of information that you can store on a Flash drive is very limited. There is hope for this solid-state medium, because it has no moving parts to go bad or vulnerable layers to deteriorate - yet it also uses drastic compression and is as yet an untested archival alternative.