Blu-Ray recorders aren't shipping. Why not BU 8GB cards to DL DVDs?

[puredrifting]

Hi all:

Trying this experiment today. Since many of us are waiting on the Blu-Ray DVD recorders to ship and for the Blu-Ray media to become available, in the meantime, why not backup each 8GB P2 card to dual layer DVD? My new G5 has a DL burner, should work okay, huh?

Testing today as soon as I can make it to Frys to pickup some DL DVDs.

Dan

 

[AppliedVisual]

It will work just great... However DL DVDs are still somewhat expensive for what they offer. Currently, the cheapest backup solution would be to backup the 8GB cards by spanning 2 DVD-Rs. HD-DVD drives should be on the market by mid March and BluRay drives by the end of April. I think most of us will have to invest in both if we're serious about distributing HD content and either could be used as a backup solution. I think with the anticipated pricing of player hardware combined with a few manufacturers that will offer dual-format players later this spring, that the format "war" will only last about a year. From there on, everyone will just have a universal player with studios continuing to support their disc format of choice. Personally, I plan to buy the < $3K Marantz universal HD-DVD, BluRay, DVD (+/-R/RW|DL) for my home theatre setup. I think it's supposed to ship in June or July.

 

[kevinM]

What I have done to back up 4G cards on a G5 is to use Disk Tools (In the Utilities folder) to make a disk image of my cards mounted on the desktop. Make sure the settings are Read Only and Uncompressed. Then just burn this to a DVD. You can then mount this disk image and it behaves just like a P2 card. Final Cut Pro will see it as a P2 volume when you import so you have a perfect copy of your P2 card including the special P2 fromat.

If you simply copy the contents of a P2 card to a DVD, I don't think Final Cut will recognize it when you import.

Making a disk image takes a bit of time but I like the idea of having a backup of my original footage just as it was on the cards that can be re-imported to Final Cut.