MiniDV to Harddrive, what is the best method?
 

I need to clear up a bunch of mini dv tapes because I figure its bad money management to keep buying everytime I need an hour of footage. What is the absolute best method of transfering it to my harddrive so I can get original or almost original quality out of the files. I'd prefer to use Adobe Premier 1.5. What settings should I use to achieve this quality?

mini dv tapes are $1.50-2.50 a piece, why not keep them. Just get a nice big box and store them there. Unless you shoot 4-5hrs of footage everyday, i dont see savings.

Buy the new Panasonic HVX 200. lets you record onto HD or sticks straight up. No more capturing , so you win a lot of time and no BS with dropped frames etc

Yo point me to where they sell them at that price. Around here they are about 10$/tape!




As for your answer... you need to transfer them through a firewire using the Microsoft DV codec. Nothing magical


As long as you have the HD space to store it, you`ll have ur vids forever (assuming ur drive never crashes)

Ripping Mini-DV to hard dive and keeping it in the DV codec is best for future editing, though this will eat up space faster than Oprah eats cake. DV compression is around 5:1, so about every second is 3.6MB of space (or about 25mbps), so a minute of DV video will be around 216mb per minute. This can add up pretty fast. While clearly better on space than uncompressed rgb, it is still going to eat up your space pretty fast.

On all my vids, after I positive (yeah, that?s rare LOL) that I am done with final product and send it off, I will compress the video one last time into mpeg-2 for future archival purposes/reference vids. This saves a shitload of space so you can fit a lot more vids per hard drive than you can with DV. Mpeg-2 is usually a lot harder to deal with though, especially if you ever have to write anything back to the tape, so until you have your finished product I would not recommend converting to Mpeg-2.

As bobbyjuly said though, you can get mini dv tapes (bulk) for under 2 bucks a pop so it may make more sense in your case to just keep the tapes and invest in a few storage boxes for them. Mini-DV tapes seem to last a long time, especially when compared to VHS tapes, so as long as you store them properly at room temp. in low humidity, I would trust a mini-dv tape holding the original video data than most hard drive setups.

btw, that Panasonic camera may rock but the price of the non dv-tape media does not. The compatible Firestore HD?s to record the data to the camcorder cost around $899 for a 40gb drive, and around $1800 for the 100GB model. The cheaper P2 cards (their ?flash? equiv), marketed by panasonic to work with the HVX 200, are around $600 for a 4GB version, and $1400 for a 8GB version. Way out of most peoples price ranges atm, especially for how little dv data can be stored on the 8GB or 4GB model lol.

One hr tape will eat up 12-13GB space on your hard disk. It costs more then a Mini DV tape for that kinda storage. Plus MiniDV tapes are more dependable compare to HD on the long run.

check out www.tapeandmedia.com for good prices on mini-dv

Wow, those prices are not that bad at all for just having to buy 20 ($2.79) but after S&H it?ll be around $3.153 a tape for el-cheapo shipping. Still, a really nice price at only 20. Most of the time I order around 200 at a time for around $2.25, around $2.45 each after S&H. If you order in a 1000 or more you can get them for just under $2.00.

thanks, i guess ill just buy more tapes