looking for suggestions on Archiving 3/4" footage

I have a friend with about thirty 3/4 inch tapes off footage that is of varying origins. Some DV, some old film etc. What codec would you recommend capturing it at to archive it on hard drives. I have a AJA I/O with component break out cables.

Uncompressed, although if you factor in storage, you may prefer prores hq.



www.strypesinpost.com

Yeah my first thought was 8 bit uncompressed but then the files would take up a lot of space.

archiving to hard-drive seems sort of an oxymoron to me.

the best thing would be to dub the tapes to Digibeta,
preferably at a tape house that could do some cleaning-up (noise reduction) via hard-ware.

that would put them in a format that will last for another 30 years or so.
the tapes would sit on the shelf, ready to be captured at any time.

and maybe get some Prores copies from the tapes if ready-to-hand files are needed.


nick

I love tapes too, but I don't think DigiBeta's going to last another 10 years, in the sense that I'd think the format would be obsolete.

But you could have it both ways: Get it onto DigiBeta first for a hard copy, then capture it back and store the files.

Digital archiving isn't the future; it's already here, with so many tapeless formats chewing up terabytes and terabytes of our storage. Pretty much have to get used to it.


www.derekmok.com

Quote
Derek
I don't think DigiBeta's going to last another 10 years, in the sense that I'd think the format would be obsolete.

that's a sad thought, Derek, but could be true.
still it could mean some more affordable J-series (Digibeta playback-only) decks on the market

Quote
Derek
tapeless formats chewing up terabytes and terabytes of our storage

yes, and of course the safest thing to do is then to back up your hard-drive onto data TAPES!
and the manufactures of those come out with new formats every couple of years...


nick

I would simply capture the footage to Apple ProRes if you are editing with Final Cut Pro. It's a 10bit codec and will keep the footage looking pretty much identical to whatever the native format was.

We had to capture from 3/4" tape for two of our latest documentaries and we actually upconverted them to 720p HD through the AJA Kona 3 board and the image came out incredibly well.

Then we re-captured everything natively to ProRes for archive on hard drive. We use the WiebeTech RTX enclosures for archiving here. It's a trayless enclosure so we can literally go buy a hard drive at Best Buy, slap it in, do the archive, then put the drive in a DriveBox and put it on the shelf. We also make a clone of all our archive drives and put them in a safe deposit box.

We run both the RTX 200 and 400 boxes in our shop.

[www.wiebetech.com]

Walter Biscardi, Jr.
Biscardi Creative Media
biscardicreative.com

What nick said, if you can afford to store your data on LTO 5, do it. That or store it to a few raid drives.



www.strypesinpost.com