Storing DV tapes long term?
 

I don't have the luxury of a pro media storage house so I need to figure a way to store some media for a few months in a hot and humid area.

One suggestion was to put them in large zip locks with silica.

What do you do?

vaccuum seal them?

put them in a bank vault. Safe, no overheating, no humidity, no nothing.

First I make HQ DVD backups of them
Then I put them in a storage drawer, vacuum sealed.

No salt to help take out moisture?

LOL no but I keep all the silica gel packages I get with electronics and I throw them in the drawers.

I'm sure that helps some. They don't pack all of that with electronics for nothing,

Thanks for the info.

Ahhh great idea!

How fast do the tapes deteriorate?

Dirty do you have someone in the states you trust? That you can send them to for safe keeping.

I actually need to keep them here for now. Just worried about it being so humid when I'm gone and moisture getting on the tapes.

The local cam shop told me zip lock with silica packs, but I am just checking around to see if there were other options.

Also be sure to store them vertically and not horizontally, as well as make sure they are fully rewound (or fully at the end of the tape). If being stored for a really long time (i.e. years), be sure to take them out periodically and fast-forward them to the end and then rewind fully.

Sometimes they can loose quality after a year or 2 depending on the tape, storage etc. I highly recommend backing them up to DVD if you have a good device to do so.

We also offer this miniDV backup service or $10 per DV tape.

http://www.essog.com/pdf/mini-dv-tap...uplication.pdf

I do back mine up, but I have some that have been sitting in my cupboard for 5 years or so. Thanks for the info!

Don't you lose quality though when you compress a full 60 min tape on a DVD? The most I can get in raw AVI is... 20 something minutes. Don't recall off the top of my head but I can never get the full 60 on there.

I am talking SD tapes here.

Using my method, I have compared the original DV tape to the DVD on a high def plasma screen and nobody could tell one from the other.

The 60 min DVD's we burn are 10mbps bitrate MPEG-2 Streams. If you rip raw mpeg-2 or upconvert the DVD you will never know it was duped.

I never understand the impulse for people to even attempt to store mini-DV footage on a DVD-R. It just won't fit! The mini-DV tapes last a long time. Earlier this year I re-captured and re-edited dozens of mini-DV tapes that I had shot as far back as 1999 and there was not a glitch on them, and some of them had been stored in a box in a barely air conditioned storage unit for years or in my own house in a drawer somewhere. Min-DV tapes make great backups, for DV and hopefully going forward for HDV footage. If I ever need to re-edit or recapture I almost always have the project files to re-compose the edit.

DV video tapes are recorded in a highly compressed 25Mbit stream. The only way to get them on DVD and retain quality is to capture the DV content as an AVI (or high res Quicktime) and then write the AVI or Quicktime file to DVD. This will only give you about ~20-25 minutes of video on a standard single layer DVD-5.

Compressing to MPEG, even at a very high bitrate, may look fine to view it, but it's a really bad idea if you intend to later use the MPEGs to edit and re-output, or transcode to a different format. MPEG is a lossy compression format, so editing from that and then re-outputting, or transcoding to another lossy format will introduce artifacting into the final video.

We keep all of our edited AVIs on RAID arrays which are also backed up on SDLT tape (SDLT, like LTO, is considered an archival format commonly used by banks and government that is supposed to be good for 50 to 100 years.) Our HD content is stored on SDLT.

Box , sealed and basement........away from heat. But first copy it all on dvd and then on drives..... ;-)

You could extract the raw video data to a hard drive then use a program like winrar to split it up into 4.5 gigs for single layer or 8.5 for dual layer dvd.

You could also just buy some extra hard drives to store the video on, a 1.5TB HDD is only $190 right now.

Lets all make a porn time capsule and store our tapes in there.

I keep all mine in military ammo boxes. They are cheap, tough, and air/water/light tight. :2 cents: