Backing up your tapes

[Shane Ross]

I personally would never do this. I would never use a DVD quality image as master footage.

I never found the need to back up tapes. Just put the masters on a shelf for later. In a nice dry cool place.

You should she the tape vaults at production companies. HUGE. Not one would consider a DVD backup as a viable option.

Shane Ross
Alokut Productions
http://www.lfhd.net

[Mitchji]

Hi,

Set your file export size in FCP to a little over 4 gigs and export your finished DV. This will create segmented QT files that you can back up to as many DVD’s as required without any quality hit.

The advantage will be cheaper more compact and probably more durable archive.

The disadvantage will be the time it takes to copy the DV to multiple discs (assuming its over about 20 minutes.

Best Wishes,

Mitch

[Tim Vaughan]

I have to agree with Shane. But if you do feel the need to backup the data, get a couple of external hard drives and import the tapes to them. That way, if you ever need to access them quickly, just grab the disk and copy it over. And keep the original tapes in a cool, dry place as the backups backup.

Tim

[Gary Hughes]

It would take approx. 3 DVDs to backup an exact copy of your 1 hour DV tape, in a DV codec. If your footage is important enough for you to consider backing it up to begin with, you need to do a DV to DV backup as either Tim or MitchJi has suggested. To back it up as DVD Video in any way would destroy it in most everyone’s opinion, probably even your customer’s.

I have had a tape go bad before, but basically, the precautions that you are considering are way too drastic for me to consider. At my day job, I have almost 3,000 tapes to keep up with, mostly digibeta. And at home, where I run my own business, I have a couple hundred miniDVs and several DV-Cam tapes. I still don’t consider it an option to copy them. I always make more than one copy of a finished master, but raw footage is venerable, but I accept that, and so do my customers. I take every precaution to be sure that a tape is new and has been fast forwarded and rewound before shooting, and I store them properly, and that’s enough for me.

I do take a precaution that most don’t take or suggest though. After finishing a show, when I archive my project, pictures, graphics, music, etc, I also backup the footage that was actually captured and used in the show. This is a fraction of what was actually shot so it’s much more manageable. Everyone I’ve seen post on here would say this is overkill, and it is, but I don’t mind because I bill the customer for a hard drive and do the archive at night, then store the hard drive that has everything on it, plus a DVD-R of all but the footage, for safe keeping.

Larry Jordan has an article on tape life https://larryjordan.biz/articles/lj_videotape.html. You should read it and some of his other articles.

Have fun,
Gary

[Bryce Whiteside]

If you come up with a 404 page not found issue, delete the period at the end of the link and refresh.

FYI,
Bryce Whiteside

Don’t worry Mr. B. I have a cunning plan…

PowerBook 1.67 Ghz ATI 9700 128 MB 2 GB
Final Cut Pro HD
DVD Studio Pro 3
Motion

[Kevin C.]

thanks for good info.
I’m getting used to this idea, in film world, that you don’t back up immediately work you just shot.

I’m a still portrait /fashion photographer, and have been shooting digitally for three years, and the first thing I do is back up everything I just shot into 2 DVD and 2 External hard drives–one off site. But this is just a few gigs of still photos.

I guess backing up moving pictures, originating from mini DV tapes is just a whole lot more tedious and draining and expensive, hence, why so many don’t bother backing up original footage.

So this is correct, most don’t back up original footage?

And if you do, way to do is camcorder to camcorder.

[Kevin C.]

JUst thinking about this some more. For many of my projects,

I’m going to be sending many of my tapes, original footage, Fed Ex, to other editors to work on, and as reliable as Fed Ex is, and other editors, etc, I just could not imagine sending the sole tape of a project where you spent thousands of dollars on models/actors/locations etc (without a backup on hand). Would you? just curious.

[Gary Hughes]

It’s not a comforting thought, but I’ve done it many times. My theory is, the least amount of time in someone elses hands, the better, therefore I ship overnight with plenty of insurance.

I do take extra precautions with tapes from live events or “once-in-a-lifetime” footage, but for studio shoots, I’ll risk having to reschedule and reshoot over all the extra worry and work on something that is most likely not going to be needed anyway.

I believe it was on the special features of Sky Captain, they mentioned that they captured in-camera as well as in-deck because they shot the entire film in 6 days (if I remember correctly). This allowed them to trust that one of the tapes was good, so they didn’t shoot safeties. Their reason was to save time, but you could implement the same idea if you’re that paranoid. One thing I do on shoots with 3 or more cameras, (when budget permits), I capture a switched feed as well. Then I carry that on the plane with me and fedex the rest back home. Worst case, one or the other will most likely be OK.

Gary

[Kevin C.]

thanks Gary,
it’s a fascinating subject.
Coming from a still photo background, it’s interesting, that I can do a digital shoots, and back up four times. On 2 dvd’s and two hardrives.

But that’s only a few Gigs of photo RAWS. Sad that video, especially, coming from the mini DV, is so much more of a hassle. Still, not sure yet if I can bear idea of shooting few actors for 8 hours and then sending it out the “only’ copy to an editor ….