50 Hours of SD footage (tape) to archive - best solution?

[dustino]

Hello all,
I've been reading through some searches regarding archiving but I'm a little confused. I know this has been discussed a lot, so feel free to point me to a particularly good thread I might have missed. Here is my situation.

I have about 50 hours of footage on PQ and MQ tapes shot with a DVX. This is for a documentary I'm making. Only a small portion of this footage is currently on a hard drive. The good news is that I'm ready to start editing, and just received a $5K grant for the project - woo hoo! Most of that cash will go towards a new computer and software to perform the editing, so my budget for archiving is not huge (in other words, a $5000 tape drive isn't a great solution for me financially). So, what is the best semi-affordable way to back up and protect this footage before I begin editing?

1.Should I just import the footage one tape at a time and back up to DVD's or a hard drive?

2. I'd prefer to simply duplicate the tapes. Could I just buy another consumer mini-dv cam to go along with the consumer cam I'm currently using as my deck and link them with firewire to make copies of each tape? Would this be an expensive process if I hired a duplicating service to do it (just make one copy of each tape - about 50 tapes?)

3. Should I buy an external RAID hard drive - put the footage on it and just edit the project from the RAID? What might that run me?

I managed to teach myself (to some degree) the production end of budget filmmaking (thanks in large part to this site), but my ignorance with respect to postproduction is pretty ginormous.

Thanks for any advice!

 

[madhorizons]

**Noob opinion follows**

How much of your budget do you have for the backup/archiving solution? I've seen network drives that work off of gigabit ethernet for ~ $900 for a 4 drive hot-swappable 1TB RAID array. They probably have firewire RAID arrays too, or even fiber. Since you have to get a new machine, unless going Apple, you can get a motherboard with SATA2 & RAID support on it and outfit the drives in there...it really depends on what you're most comfortable with.

I personally would be more comfortable with a solid RAID drive set up vs. transferring to another analog media. Now, how to connect the RAID for optimal set up, is up for discussion as I don't know what's best in a video environment. My guess would be something that can handle at least 100MBps and has hot-swappable capability in case of drive failure.