Recommend a digital archiving solution

DAMsmart: http://www.damsmart.com.au/

Thanks for the replies guys. I’ll email Plum Media and see what they quote for the service. I get the impression from the look of their website they may have corporate clients in mind but it is a good start.

It’s a little bit of an odd situation but basically the tapes are borrowed from a friend who does not have the charger for their minidv camera any more and I haven’t been able to find anyone else with access to one of those cameras.

My hope is to make a transfer now before they become even more hard to find (and the commercial transfer services become more expensive) and also so I can watch and enjoy the content in the meantime. Ideally I would just get a transfer to data so I can archive and author a dvd from it myself.

Are you tallking about a digital archiving solution or transferring your tapes to DVD? If it’s the latter you’re probably better off to store your tapes in a cool dry location. Recordable DVDs are not a suitable archiving platform. I’ve had more dropouts and signal losses from 6 month old DVDs than my 10 and 20 year old tapes, all of which are still as good as the day I put them in the cupboard.

The most cost-effective solution would be to buy a VHS/DVD combo and record your tapes onto DVD via the input cables, and hope that the DVDs outlast the tapes. The longest starage solution is probably to capture the footage on hard drives using a capture card, and then store the hard drives in a cool dry place, and hope the format will still be readable in 20 or 30 years when your tapes and DVDs are possibly going to deteriorate.

and tedious (and probably because it gets tedious).

What I’d recommend is a DIY setup. I can’t make final recommendations as one method has one advantages over the other, and each method has its advantages and disadvantages.

I have had experience using Plum Media for a bulk job of editing, converting and annotating video from range of source tapes to DVD. They did a good job.

Be warned though, this kind of thing gets expensive very quickly.