[kennedy]

I have dozens of Mini-DV tapes full of stuff I want to preserve.
Burning them to disc is obviously better than just leaving them on tape. What's the best way to do this?

Saving them as VCDs is fine for viewing purposes, but is not suitable for preservation as significant resolution is tossed and the MPEG-1 compression is clearly lossy.

Is full quality resolution really the full resolution of the DV-stream? And how lossy is MPEG-2? If I try to pull a DVD burned by iDVD back into iMovie, how much of the original video quality will I have lost?

If DVD format is reasonable for archiving, far cheaper than DVD-Rs for preservation would be to do SVCDs (DVD resolution and compression on a CD). Of course, I am not sure how to do that (see the SVCD thread on that).

If DVD's MPEG2 format is not suitable for preservation, then I could just save the DV-streams... though they are so huge that it would take a tremendous number of discs.

Is there a *lossless* compression for DV-streams (available on the Mac)?
Will ZIP or SIT work? They are lossless, of course; but can they reasonably compress those huge files? Without leveraging inter-frame compression, I'd think they would do poorly. What's desperately needed is lossless inter-frame compression.

Any ideas?

Thanks!

[lucylawless]

well, I know Apple's Animation codec is lossless. Personally I would go for a high-quality lossy compression (because really, your eye is only so good). Experiment a little with your 3ivx and VP3 and Sorenson and MPEG2 and MPEG4 (if we even see it before MPEG5 is the standard...). Obviously you have high standards, and as such no one will probably be able to advise you better than you can advise yourself. I highly doubt that SIT or ZIP compression will get you anywhere at all. I was under the impression that they were targeted at compressing text data. I know I sat for 2 hours once trying to sqeeze 1-2 MB out of a 703MB divx file, and the SIT version was actually bigger. For the MPEG2's I don't see how SVCD's would be cheaper than DVD-R's. We can agree that the same data is going on the disc, yes? at $150 for 4.7 GB, a dvd-r is equivalent to $0.22 per CD, so I guess DVD is about 2x the price (worth it for convenience IMO, especially for such big files), but I've become distracted by price....iDVD's biggest limitation for you is going to be that it is CBR (I think?). DVD Studio Pro I believe is capable of VBR encoding, and therefore getting I think up to 6 hours on one disc. I know iDVD is limited to 60 min for good quality or 90 minutes for marginal quality. I've only burned one disc with iDVD, but that's usually enough experience to get a feel for an iApp...I think there was a thread around here a few months ago about tricking iDVD into producing an MPEG2 file (usually it encodes, burns and discards the file in one long motion), but I don't remember if the point was burning multiple copies or in producing an SVCD...