Recording stream folder into pieces?

[skooby_aka]

I make up my shots on dvd's for greater security!
And I was using cards 4gb and 8gb, which normally fit on media dual layer!
But now with card 16 gb, how to proceed?
Could split the stream folder into pieces and then join?
It is doubt!

[BobDiaz]

It depends on the software you are using to burn the DVDs. Because of the FAT32 format, no single file is larger than 4GB and would fit onto a SL 4.7GB DVD.

For example, with Toast 9, it breaks the back-up into several disks if needed. If one copies all the disks to the hard drive, all the parts to the structure should be there. (I have not tested this, but in theory should work.)


Bob Diaz

[ShugPro Digital Studio]

i second that Bob, especially if you let Toast take care of spanning the files across the disk, i would think you'd be able to rebuilt the folder correctly very easily.

[skooby_aka]

Thanks to Bob and ShugPro, I'll do this test with dvd's of dual layer and then post the results here!

[Robert M Wright]

I use 7-Zip for making files for spanning DVD disks, to backup cards larger than 4GB, on the PC. I don't like the fragility of doing that though (one disk goes bad and it's a mess). I'm sort of toying with the idea of writing software to backup cards, using a RAID like approach (but perhaps getting a bit more sophisticated with error correction also), to provide fault tolerance for when a DVD disk goes bad. I'm not real whipped on getting back into writing software though - been years and years now.

[BobDiaz]

When it comes to back-up, I'm a strong believer of, "never put all you eggs in one basket" approach. If your only back-up to a given video spans two DVDs, your asking for trouble. (Remember, "Murphy's Law is always waiting to happen.)

Now if you have two sets of two DVDs OR if one back-up is on DVDs and another on a USB Hard drive, at least if one goes bad, the other might survive.



Bob Diaz

[Cranky]

Panasonic uses FAT32 on cards, so files are 4GB at most, which means they will fit standard 4.5GB DVD disc. ISO9660 does not allow files larger than 1GB on a DVD, so you need to burn a UDF disk, 2.50 or later. Proper AVCHD and Blu-ray discs use UDF.

If you shot a long scene that spawns multiple files, these files can be reconciled easiliy with "copy /b" command. You have to know yourself which files belong to one larger file, but these are easy to spot. Panasonic's (and Sony's and canon's) utilities can do this for you, they look for clipinfo to figure out which disk files belong to one large scene. This is the only value that these utilities have

If you want your DVDs to be readable on a Blu-ray player as valid AVCHD discs, you have to master them. This means that you use only MTS files from your card and build new discs for each 4-something GB of files. MultiAVCHD can do this, but it is slow as it copies stuff around several times. It is a pain. If you don't care about Blu-ray playability and you don't care about clipinfo metadata, just dump the MTS files onto discs.

[Robert M Wright]

I make dual copies of anything I care about, but that can get to be a bit much. Consider that copying the contents of a 32GB card onto low-cost single layer DVDs takes more than a dozen disks to make redundant copies. Taking a RAID-5 approach can offer close to the same level of security, with close to half the number of disks. Get just a little fancy about it (but not going nuts), using a fairly simple error correction strategy to make it pretty easy to recover most the data from a disk with a few bad sectors (like perhaps even just as simply as making dual copies of the video file headers, stored as individual files, and essentially breaking the a/v stream data down into to a couple hundred individual files, per disk, as far as the filing system on the disk is concerned), and you can achieve essentially much better security than with simple dual copy redundancy with simple disk spanning of a single zip file (or the like) - and with a lot less disks.

[Robert M Wright]

Making redundant copies of large SDHC cards, with the contents spanned over a bunch of single layer DVD disks, is simple and cheap (about a buck or so for storing an hour of source AVCHD footage), but it takes a considerable amount of time to burn disks by the dozen - and they are starting to pile up too!

[Robert M Wright]

I really do need to switch over to storing source footage on BD-R disks. It costs a bit more, but it's not so off-the-wall expensive like when blanks were well over $10 a pop.