Interim format for home video stuff?

Question on best format to store edited extracted DV output? (forgive any ignorance, I am new to this).

I have lots of miniDV and Video8 tape material (usual home family stuff), which I can extract off my V8 and DV cameras.

I would like to tidy up (cut-out pauses and general rubbish) this “raw material” and save to disk for later editing and writing to DVD and MPEG2.

What is the best (highest res, max quality) format to store this “interim” content for later final editing? I don’t want to keep the original extraction off the cam-corders, as there is as much as 50% rubbish there taking up valuable space.

I do final outputting as MPEG2 (from Studio 8), for convenience, should I use this format for my interim files as well (is that what Studio 8 uses anyway)? Or is there something better, which Studio 8 does not give me as an option?

[laser]

Hi

I do the same thing and store all material as AVI files before the footage is edited and converted to MPEG2 for DVD.

I cut out the main sections which I know I will not use, this usually gets rid of 60% of the footage. The rest is then stored as AVI until I get round to the fine editing of individual frames. This mainains the best quality and requires no additional encoding after capturing from mini dv or S-VHS.

As AVI file sizes are still around four times larger than MPEG2 you could backup AVI files to DVD-RW to free up mini dv tapes. You could split footage into 4.5GB chunks and then reassemble later. To be honest though with mini dv tapes not costing much more than £1.60 for JVC and Panasonic tapes, it's hadly worth it.

You could also dump roughly edited AVI files back onto mini dv cassettes if your camcorder has DV in and store them like that.

[MarkE19]

I agree with the above! Only an AVI format file is 100% of the origional quality.
I also agree that the best way to archive the footage is back to a DV tape. I keep all my origionals and also an edited copy on DV tape and create a DVD for day to day viewing. he reason for keeping the edited footage on DV tape is that DVD disks are too easily damaged and if the disk is your only copy you have lost it. Recapture from a DV tape and then burn to another DVD is quick & easy and as stated DV tapes are now very cheap, probably cheaper than a DVD-/+RW disk.

Mark.

That is exactly the advice I wanted. Cheers and thanks.