Archiving digital camcorder Video

[torriegirl]

Will a blue ray recorder give me better camvcorder video.I have twenty hours af my childrens video that needs archiving on disc.I have waited and wondered is it better to wait and buy a blue ray recorder.If so what would be the benefits if any.Right now i am using a pioneer dvd 533 hs recorder.It can burn on double layers also and i am just so hesitant to do anything now.The longer i wait the technology keeps changing.

[Marwin]

I guess it depends on your camcorder and to what media you recorded the video. If your DVD recorder is limiting the quality of the video then Blu-ray should be able to improve it as it supports higher resolutions, otherwise it probably shouldn't matter.

[AV_Integrated]

If the original video was in DV format (mini-DV tapes) and you have edited it to 20 hours, or have 20 hours of tapes, you should consider that the ONLY way to preserve 100% of the quality, is to copy the DV format video in DV format to discs.

This will give you a bit-for-bit identical copy to the original and can be copied to hard drive, DVD, flash drives, floppy discs, or even Blu-ray. It's just data, not video. The key with video is that you do NOT want to change the format that it was originally recorded in for the best results.

Unfortunately, Blu-ray players require DV video to be encoded using a different method than DV. So, you will typically see a shot in video quality if you go from the DV format to one of the Blu-ray (or HD-DVD) allowable formats and want to just play the video back in your stand-alone Blu-ray Disc player.

When I edit, I always take the original video clips and put them onto a DVD-R and save those individual clips for later use if I need to. Plus, I save the final, fully edited video onto a DVD as a DV format video as well. Only after all the original masters are saved and backed-up do I begin encoding the video for playback on normal DVD players.

These backups take up a LOT of room. Typically more than 1 or 2 Blu-ray discs (23GB) would hold. So, the least expensive way to backup the video is to put it onto another mini-DV tape. Just connect 2 cameras via a firewire cable and record out of one, into the other. Digitally perfect copies!

[Don Blish]

As the above post says, a single DV tape is bulky: about 13 Gigs. That could be one hour of standard def (480x720ntsc or 576x720pal). Standard mini DV is lightly compressed "within the frame", ie akin to individual jpg frames. The 13 gig tape could also be HDV, like my new Sony camera. Here the one hour of material is compressed more heavily with Mpeg which uses "interframe compression". In this case each "group of frames" starts with a full frame and then just the parts of the next few frames that change are stored. In any event, both standard miniDV and HDV use the same 25megaBIT data rate. The Blu-ray data rate can be as high as 36MBps, if memory serves.

I can tell you that if standardDV material is "upscaled" into an HDV project (my Sony HDR-HC1 projects are 1080x1440 at 30 interlaced frames per second), the material is indistinguishable from the original, and MUCH better than DVD compression. DVD compression is always 8megaBITS per second or less.

All this is a roundabout way of saying that, of course, you could save all your clips for an edited project on a data-formatted Blu-ray as suggested above. But if you created a high def project on Blu-Ray with your video footage and any good stills, the result would be playable, as is.

[Psiweaver]

and will be even more so in the future when true 3 ccd hd cameras come down to a reasonable price point.

Where you get it???