suggestions for ongoing future video archive

[Phil Schuman]

We have some 8mm video - both analog and now 8mm digital Hi8 (Sony).
I just used MM to capture and create a couple of short clips for YouTube.

But what would be some suggestions for creating "something" for the future
by copying the entire 8mm tape, vs just keeping them in a box
and then not have any "player" in the future to view them.

 

[PapaJohn]

I dubbed my 8mm and Hi8 tapes to mini-DV tapes using two camcorders...

 

[Graham Hughes]

Tape is cheap and it has a long life span so having it on the latest medium
as Papajohn says is a good idea.

If I read your post though you don't have a minidv cam, so your best bet may
be to store them on hard drives.

The best quality format is dv-avi, at 13gb per hour it will take up some
space, but if they are important treasured memories it's not worth
compressing them to maek them small to fit, you may as well just keep the
original tapes.

 

[P.Schuman]

I think about the photo world,
and how friends give me grief for still shooting 35mm film (and digital).

A few years ago, my wife and her sisters, for their parents 50th anniv,
dug thru their classical shoebox of old photos to create a PPT presentation.

What will happen in 50 years -
digging thru "our" 50yr old shoebox of MMC, SD, CF, etc cards,
or looking for some old antique CD/DVD/HD/Blu-Ray/XYZ reader,
while the "paper" photos are sitting there all nice in their folders

I even have some old 16mm and 8mm film of us as a kid
that I should transfer over to something.... for better storage and readability.

If I "outsource" some of this digital copying,
just curious what do these folks usually use for their digital settings ?
resolution - frames - bitrate, final medium (-R DVD) and which codec, etc

 

[Guest]

I have a different take on this. I copy my videos from tape to my harddrive
at the highest possible setting without editing. I then copy those files to 2
DVDs. I put one DVD in a safe deposit box and the other in a safe in my
house. I also do the same to any special movie I make as well as all the
pictures I take (and I take pictures of everything - my boys' medals and
trophies, awards, my woodworking projects, etc). If anything happens to my
house I still have my memories in a safe place. I figure in 20 or 30 years
when technology has advanced I will copy the DVDs to another type of medium
without losing any quality. I'm sure by then it will take a whole minute to
copy a DVD. 20 or 30 years after that I will let my grandkids take care of it.

 

[Graham Hughes]

I do this for a living and I always capture as dv-avi for video, be it cine,
HI8 or digital.
Customers then have this in a variety of ways.
I suggest either tape, in minidv if they have this facility or hdd.
The burning of dvds is so hit and miss in quality, even if you take great
care to burn slow and use high quality discs, I wouldn't like to think that
they may not be readable in 30 years time. Whereas there'll be people who
offer minidv to whatever as a serive still.