Rescuing videotapes for the future

With 50 videotapes of our wedding, the kids, family events and more (thank God they’re already digital on miniDV), I’ve become increasingly concerned that — since videotape has a finite shelf life before color fades and dropouts increase dramatically — it was time to get the video off to a digital format and ensure longevity.

I’ve been slowly-but-surely dumping some select videotapes on to mycomputer (a Powermac with an external Maxtor 250GB hard drive just forvideo), but hours of video sucks up A LOT of space. I’ve been using Apples iDVD to make ’em in to DVD’s after using iMovie to edit the videos…but it takes an hour of real-time transfer per tape and I thought, “there’s got to be a better way.”

Though they’ve been out for awhile, I’ve started some seriousinvestigation on DVD Recorders. Why? Taking either component or S-Videoout from the miniDV camcorder, connecting it to the DVD Recorder and pressing “record”, it’s supposedly a simple matter to transfer video to DVD and do so fast. Once on a recorded DVD, it’ll be easy for me to then suck the video off the DVD on to my computer for editing with iMovie and use iDVD for those special videos I want to make in to keepsakes.

So here’s the DVD Recorder I’ve asked for for my birthday or Christmas: Toshiba | D-KR2: DVD Recorder (I know, I know…they have one with a hard drive, but I really only need the recording capability. The HD is great for making multiple copies, but I can do that with my computer).

UPDATE 12/18/04: I discovered today while seeing this unit in person (“Borsch…ever think of reading the specs!?!”) that this recorder also has a Firewire input! This means no digital-to-analog-to-digital conversion will happen from my miniDV camera to the DVD recorder. Digital-to-digital is a beautiful thing.