tape duplication/electronic backups?

T

tommyrockum

New member
i'm shooting a documentary on DV and i've shot about 350 hours of footage so far. i was hoping to make dupes of all the footage either onto DV tape or onto a hard drive, but all i seem to be able to find online are dupe houses that run off many copies of one tape, not backup dupes... any recommendations?:dankk2:
 
Backing up to a HDD would be a not-so-great way to go, IMO. Dubs are the way to go. Are you sure the dupe houses only do many copies of a single tape? I've sent tapes out (well, my various employers not me personally) tapes for just 1:1 copies (back-ups, NTSC to PAL, etc.,) a number of times. Is there a dupe house located near you that you could just call?

-A
 
i'm sure there are dupe houses around...i live in LA after all... :) but when i try to find them via google all i can seem to find are place that do many copies of one tape, rather than 1:1 dupes.

anyone able to point me in the right direction? (also, hopefully in a frugal direction as the project is already straining its budget...)
 
Timely topic, I am facing the same problem.

Do these dupe services preserve timecode on the duplicate tape?

I am assuming only high-end decks have this capability?
 
If you have 350 hours to back up, getting it done at a duplication facility is going to put a huge hole in your budget. Effectively you will be paying for the source deck per hour, record deck per hour, operator time per hour... times 350 hours, plus stock. A more affordable option would be to rent (or buy) a couple of DV decks and dub everything yourself. You might find community media projects, schools or event videographers who have DV decks they can rent/sell cheaply. If you do the sums it will take you a minimum of 5 or 6 weeks of fairly solid dubbing.

That might also be a good time to evaluate and log the footage to identify the material that is most useful to how your documentary is shaping up. You may decide that some of the tapes are no longer relevant to the way your documentary has developed. If they don't warrant a back up, just store them securely. Some kind of critical selection process is the first step to discovering what shape the edited documentary will take.

In your situation, I personally think that digitising the tapes to hard drive is a valid 'back up' option. Ideally mirror the hard drive in case one fails, and lock the DV camera tapes away for safety. Digitising the footage requires only one DV deck and you can use your stock budget to buy a lot of hard drive space. It's also a more efficient way to start selecting and organising footage which will save time when you start editing.

I use a hot-swappable eSATA enclosure with a seperate drive 'caddy' for each bare hard drive. It's a cheap option if you need to manage data across many drives.
www.firmtek.com/seritek/seritek-2en2/

Whichever option you choose, make sure that you store the back ups in a completely seperate location to the camera tapes, somewhere secure with low fire/flood risk.

It's going to be a long dubbing/selection process, so make sure you're somewhere comfortable and remember to go outside at least once a day!

Re. timecode, I believe you simply select the source of the timecode on the record deck, so matching TC should be achievable even on basic equipment. If you use a dubbing facility explicitly state that you need matching timecode and check a few tapes to confirm that it does match before you pay your bills (because accidents happen).

What is the topic of your documentary?
 
Following Russell's line of though the cheapest method is to get two cameras (any MiniDV camera will do) and do the dubs yourself via Firewire. It's what I'm doing right now pretty much (although I'm borrowing a deck from work when I get the chance). But you'll not be able to copy the time code over though unless you get a prosumer level deck. I think the DSR-11 is the cheapest deck that will accept external TC, but only when it's recording in DVCAM mode.

LA411.com is a good place to get a list of dupe facilities and then just start calling for rates.


-A
 
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