DVDWS2 hangs when "Flushing DV transcode buffer"

[Alan Mintaka]

Hi Devil,
As far as storage capacity goes: in my system the 300GB drives used to for DVD projects typically have at least 30 projects on them. Each project contains on average a 2 hour recording plus other support files such as images, sound files, project files, and so on.

If the runtimes of the MPEG-2 video files are taken into consideration, that's at least 60hrs per drive. So no, 23 hours is not enough for me. Of course I could buy more drives if I switched over to AV exclusively, but I don't have that kind of money. The alternative would be to either delete the projects or store them in raw form on DVDs.

If stored in raw form on DVDs, the AVI files for 2 hour recordings would span several discs. At, say, 25GB per recording, I would need at least 6 SL discs for each one. That would be less than 6 bucks per, or somewhat less than 180 bucks for 30 recordings. I suppose that's less than a 300GB HD would cost in some markets, but it's still big bucks for me. Plus it would take a lot of work, and I would need a reliable way to split (and recombine if needed) AVI files.

I'm putting this on the table to explain how I'm hamstrung here. I can work with MPEG-2 files that use a lot less space than AVI, but I'll be sacrificing a lot of A/V quality, and experiencing the kind of problems I'm having with transcoding in realtime with WS2. AVI files would run me out of hard drive space, and possibly out of food as well.

Is it wishful thinking to hope that Blu-Ray and/or HDDVD will resolve these sorts of issues?

Have a good one,
Big Al Mintaka

[sjj1805]

Please view:
Preserving your recordings

[dannyp]

Alan figure that:
A Mini DV tape costs 5$
A 500Gig external HD costs 200$
1 hour of DV footage id 13Gig
Assumig you want to leave 15% free on a HD for Defragmentig purposes
you are left with 425Gig

425Gig makes 32 hours of DV-AVI Video
32 hours of Video need 32 Mini DV tapes(on SP speed)-Total cost 160$

I think that this gives you a starting point in order to decide how to back up your raw materials.
Not less important is to always make an extra copy of the Authored DVD
and use it only if you loose all other copies.

So for 40$ more you get:

Easy accses to your raw materials.

Easy to hook up a HD to a computer even if it is 20 years from now.

And remember that your raw material is in digital format and there will
always be a program that will encode it to what ever format will pop up
in the future.

Take Care
Danny

[Devil]

Easy to hook up a HD to a computer even if it is 20 years from now.

Be careful: that may not be true. You certainly could not hook up a pre-IDE HDD to a modern computer. Before 1986, all HDDs (for PCs) were MFM types. In 1986, SCSI drives came along and, I think, IDEs were marketed a year or two later, but they were not ATA. There were also ESDI and SATA didn't arrive until about 4 years ago. You cannot even hook up an IDE drive to many modern machines (short of adding a special card). I would be the last to forecast that HDDs will even exist in 10 years from now, let alone 20.

[Alan Mintaka]

Danny and Devil,

You both raise very good points. Danny, I appreciate that analysis of cost vs. storage and ease of use between DV tape and HD. That one's going into the permanent clipboard I keep for such things.

Lately, though, I've been coming around to Devil's way of thinking about these issues. I was around to help Noah figure out what a cubit was, so I've been through a lot of the technology changes he describes. In all cases it wasn't so much extremely long life of storage media that mattered; it only had to last just long enough to be transferred successfully to a new technology.

After reading Devil's message I went to the closet where I store legacy hard drives, cards, etc, and realized that what he was saying is true: if I wanted to recover any of that data now, I'd have to jump through hoops with all sorts of adapter cards, external drive enclosures, and so on. Fortunately that data has already been recovered on the fly, as each drive type passed into oblivion and the next one became available for the transfer.

Now Blu-Ray and/or HDDVD and/or some combinations or variations of the two are imminent. How long before I take all those DVD projects and recorded discs and transfer them to the higher density media? As soon as the drive prices drop, that's when. Thus, longevity of recorded DVD's and the media used to store the projects are fast becoming secondary.

In the mantime, that leaves space as the big consideration. This is where Danny's arguments come back into the fray. During the current transition of technology, what makes more sense as a storage option? Personally I like the HD option because the tradeoff between price and ease of use makes it worthwhile.

As far as HD's going away completely, it'll be interesting to see what comes along in their place. Maybe it'll be some other kind of mechanical rig, like a RAM optical drive of some sort. Or maybe flash memory technology will get to the point where cost vs. storage vs. performance vs. reliability makes it a better option. This is another good reason to keep storage options in the air for a while: too many changes about to happen soon.

Those are just some ideas I've been tossing around lately. I'm also looking at better compression options for all the non-video files associated with my DVD projects, i.e. audio, graphic, authoring software project files, and so on. That stuff adds up to quite a bit of storage over many projects. Right now my money is settling onto WinZIP or WinRAR. They're more open-platform than Windows-based backup programs such as Acronis, Norton Ghost, and so on. Besides, they're easier to use.

Thanks much to everyone who has responded in this thread so far. Your postings have been giving me a lot of constructive ideas and sensible ways to approach all of this.

Have a good one,
Big Al Mintaka