seeking Native digital archivist

[Felicity Helen Meakins]

> Why don't you simply use a digital video camera, and then save on DVD? DVD
> is about the best stuff there is, and if you get good quality stuff, your
> recordings will be as safe as they can be.

I am involved in the Aboriginal Child Language Acquisition project in
Australia, and we have stacks of video that needs archiving. We have been
agonising over this stuff for quite a while. DVD was one option we
explored and decided against it. You can store only about 4.7GB on DVD (20
min of uncompressed footage is about 8GB), and the burnable DVDs are only
one layer (unlike commercial ones which are two layer). As I understand
it, this means they have a very short life span. We are archiving on hard
disks and servers as a result. It's not cheap but there's not much option.
We use Quicktime and Final Cut Pro to 'digitise' the DV tapes.

Felicity

www.unimelb.edu.au/linguistics/research/projects/acla/index.html