RE: [MLUG] video compression

["Pottinger, Hardy J." <EMAIL:PROTECTED>]

Mike, unless the cost of tapes is prohibitive, you should plan on
keeping them, regardless of your *other* backup decisions. Those tapes
are your original source materials, anything you do to read off of them
is creating a derivative (i.e. lower quality copy). Stored correctly,
your sources can function as an additional backup. AND, more
importantly, you'll never get any better quality than the source
material. So if a better codex comes along, you'll be able to take
advantage of it. Finally, re-using tape will put future recordings at
risk--tape is inherently fragile, the more you use it, the less reliable
it will become.

Of course, this is all heavily dependent on your content. If we're
talking surveillance footage here, by all means reuse the tapes. ;-) If
we're talking a kid's first steps, save the tape.

As far as backing up your derivative files, you've happened upon the
great glaring need of the digital millennium: Where do we put all this
stuff we are constantly creating? How do we keep it backed up?

Others on the list have already mentioned the defacto standard right
now, which is to rely and HD backup. But we're rapidly approaching a
time where some kind of public or public/private infrastructure will be
required to handle the volume of data being created.

In the academic realm, Digital Institutional Repositories aim to handle
one aspect of this problem (where do we put *some* of this stuff), but
really we're talking about Digital Asset Management for the masses. Or,
well, for you, Mike Miller. :-)

Google around, there are lots of people writing about the problem, and
trying to hash out ways for individuals to deal with an ever-growing
need to store and backup data.

--Hardy  

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