What is the shelf life of a miniDV tape

Why not doing it right now while you still have the tapes and the camcorder to play them? Two 15GB BDs per cassette. Then keep both discs and tapes.

If kept properly (temperature, humidity, avoid direct sunlight) they will last quite a long time based on the articles I've read.

I have tapes from the same timeframes as you and mine work 100%. I'm in the process of getting a 4 Tb raid drive to back up all my tapes (VHS, 8MM, MiniDV), I'd highly recommend the same. Raid guarantees 2 backups in case any of the drives fail and I easily swap out another drive if need be.

The one I'm looking at is about $360 US.


BDs (Blu-ray) discs only come in increments of 25 Gb (50 for dual layer, 100 for BD-XL), so one single layer BD would hold 2 MiniDV tapes etc.

Yeah, I remember from my days of transferring miniDV that an hour of footage was roughly equal to 13GB of uncompressed media files.

I am about to start the long, arduous task of transferring a lot of old footage as well. Wish me luck, too!

You and me both!!! I have I think at last count over 200 tapes in total: VHS, 8mm and MiniDV combined! LOL

life i say stored well at least 50 years but playing them is another story.quality technicaly mini dv is slightly higher but you would need hawk eyes to spot the difference on proper copies.

Fore those who are going to or already have, what software are you using to transfer from camera to computer? I have to do the same and wondering.

What format will you save it in? I have a few I did with Roxio and have ISO files but not sure this is the best way to go.

Any software should be capable of trasfering dv tape;to pc or external drive without loss,the captured footage can be edited if needed then rendered to what format is needed,IE DVD.

Use WinDV to transfer your miniDV tapes to your PC. You must use a Firewire cable to do the transfer as this will ensure that you have an exact copy of what's on the tape. Do not use any USB/RCA cable interface as the quality of the video will be lower.

1 hour of miniDV footage will be approximately 13 Gigabytes and will be in the AVI (DV-AVI codec) format.

You can download WinDV from here:
http://windv.mourek.cz/

If you have a video editing application like Vegas or Windows Movie Maker on your PC, then you can use that instead.

Thanks guys. Sorry OP, I didn't mean to hijack your thread. Just saw someone brought up the subtopic.