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11/13/09
Huh? These are still like one of the primary formats for professional videographers. I hardly know anyone who regularly goes straight to HDD or P2 card. I know I use them constantly.
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If you want your video stored on bits and pieces storage media, digging them out as you need them, more power to you. I'm done with that era. My music collection, my movie collection, my photos and yes my home movies are all easily accessible and viewable on my TV at a moment's notice thanks to large format digital storage.
But you just keep on shufflin' through those tapes. And don't forget to rewind! #minidvcaseiphonestand
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But when we meet it seems I can't let gooooo.
(can't let go!)
Every time you leave the room... #minidvcaseiphonestand
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Truth be told, most new formats only consider the short game. Get footage from the lens to the compy as fast as you can. Tapes, while slower, archive better. They're easier to handle, the sensitive parts have a protective casing, and most importantly: per unit, they're cheap. Stick a label on a tape and it archives itself. With flash/hard drive based memory, you've got to sort your video files, name them properly, burn/transfer them to some long-term media. And hope to high heaven they're as durable as those tapes you were so eager to get rid off.
Not to mention the crap I've had to deal with getting video into a usable format from a hard drive camera. Until that mess gets thoroughly standardized, I'd sooner hand draw each frame. #minidvcaseiphonestand
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On the campus I work at, we constantly have departments (especially athletics) complaining about how worthless their HDD/DVD/Flash-based cameras are, because either the DVD media is too flaky and expensive, or they don't have anywhere to keep all the massive files from their hours-long game 'tapes', plus then they have to spend more time converting them to be able to show them on something other than the camera itself, because for some reason they all use lame-ass proprietary formats. #minidvcaseiphonestand
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Many people think that because it's "DV" that somehow being "digital" means that it won't degrade, but from what I understand that's just not true. Tape is supposed to be good for about 10-15 years, but that it can degrade much quicker than that depending on conditions. Even storing the tape around ordinary home AV equipment can expose it to electromagnetic fields that can degrade the tape. According to a few sites, "Short term exposure [to electromagnetic fields] has few deleterious effects, but over time even a modest magnetic field can seriously degrade the tape."
If I'm wrong, certainly let me know. I'm no expert on the subject, but from what I'd heard I'd always thought that DV might be convenient, but it's not a permanent media for archiving.
11/13/09
Of course, where I work, we only archive tapes for about ten years, then destroy them. And I think when you get into archiving, you have to start figuring out how long you're going to keep them. Anything beyond 10-15 years, and you really should have a re-archival procedure. Some media may be better than the other over the short game, but nothing lasts 100 years. Anyone in business with an archive of tapes ought to invest in a department that goes through old files and recaptures/copies/transfers/whatever to new media. You can bet that the big movie studios have whole warehouses devoted to keeping up with all the old movie reels.
I guess in that respect, digital media has the advantage, not necessarily that it doesn't degrade over time, but that it doesn't degrade over copies. If a tape/disc needs replacing every 15 years, and you recopy it every ten, you could maintain an almost perfect original indefinitely. #minidvcaseiphonestand