I have captured the video from my panasonic pv-gs120 mini dv to my hard drive as avi files using pinnacle studio 9 and my firewire capture card. the reulting size is about 13.4 GB. I am going to convert these to mpg2 for viewing on DVD or a media drive. I would like to archive the original captured avi but 13.4 GB is too big since I am going to be capturing dozens of videos. Is the captured avi video already compressed via lossless codec or can I losslessly compress these files more?
No, not really. Panasonic DV is about as good as you're going to do. I don't think Huffyuv, the other main lossless codec, will do any better. It's only 3 single-layer DVDs though, as long as you don't run into any limitations in your file-splitting software. But if it's that important, I'd use Quickpar to make some parity volumes of the data that's going to go on the 3 DVDs and stick it on a fourth DVD.
I should add that when using Quickpar, it's best to split your file into pieces e.g. 100 Mb each. Create PAR2 files from all those. The reason being that if worse comes to worst and you DO have to use the recovery PARs, you only have to rebuild the damaged section, not an entire disc, and you don't have to copy the whole thing to your hard drive (which you may not be able to do if a disc is damaged anyway) and save yourself lots of time as well.
Another good idea to archive your edited movies is to stream them back to miniDV tape. That is what I currently do. But I am going to change my strategy very soon: just store them on an external hard drive. I recently saw a 250GB HD for only $35. This is good for around 20 hours and that is even cheaper than 20 miniDV tapes and a more reliable storage.
Not really. There's less to go wrong with a tape than with an HD, and even an unused HD will experience bit rot, and eventual servo or controller failure. Either one depends, of course, on how it's handled and stored. Plus, there's also the fact that, with a HD, you're putting an awful lot of eggs in one basket. Ideally, you'd use both. But if you go the HD route, buy two or three and make duplicates.
You certainly have a good point there. And that is why I currently use miniDV tape and probably also keep storing on tape as a back-up to hard drive storage. Be aware that tape also has problems on the long run (it should be wind and rewind once in while to avoid that information is transferred from one wind to the next due to the magnetic field). BTW: whatever your archive strategy is, it should be aimed at a period of around 10 years. By that time you should transfer your archive to the newest generation media for data storage. If you handel your hard drive with care its should last for ten years.
