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Hi all
I am going through a VERY CONSUMING process of saving all of home movies accummulated over the years to hard disk. All of this footage has been edited with various Cassie equip over the years. It is all archived currently on DVD and/or Blu Ray AND miniDV tape. My question is this: to archive footage which source should I use: the DVD/Blu Ray discs or the miniDV tape?

The miniDV tape is preferred in terms of lossless quality but it is more time consuming to load and there are occassional drop outs which is annoying. Dvd and/or Blu Ray DVD is easier to load, I have already checked it for quality whenoriginally created over the years so likely no drop outs (unless they degraded but I think thats less likely - hopefully!) BUT is the QUALITY of the footage that much worse? Thats the million dollar question I think.

Thoughts on this?

Thanks in advance!

I would think that if you are only interested in archiving the footage then backing up your discs and Dv tapes should be fine. If however you think you'd like to edit that footage in the future, then you should go with the lossless copies. Editing from Mpeg 2 DVD footage results in pixelated footage on the finished product because it's compressed twice. Anything on DV tape will be lossless, no compression. But will take up a ton of space in your archives.

I agree with Chris that the original tapes will yield a superior quality. I would add that hard drives are getting bigger and cheaper all the time, so why not go with the tapes?

I would add that with the constantly increasing speed of computers and the constantly increasing sophistication of software, there will come a time when algorithms will have the ability to intelligently restore and improve the quality of original video. The better the quality of the video you have to work with, the better the result will be.