Longterm preserving of imovie projects

Question

I would like some advice on the long term preservation of imovie edited family movies.I originally understood that DVDs would last 50 yrs. I now know that that is not so. Is creating a disk image and storing that on a hard disk the best option or is there other advice.

Answer 1

bjgall35
Libraries, archives and others give much attention to the issue you raise. It might be worth looking around the web to gather their approaches to your issue. To some extent, your approach depends on the size of your digital movie collection, but I think our expectation should be that our digital media holdings will keep growing.
Having your family and personal movies, photos, music and even personal records in digital format is an important start to achieving long-term preservation of your collections . Once digitised, then they are much easier to register with various software programs as well as maintaining quality of the movies, etc.
I will assume that you are working with digital media.
You might think about what is likely to stop you preserving your digital media over a long period of time. Here are two key ones:
1. The media (ie the storage medium) storing your digital media no longer works
2. The software that created your digital media, etc doesn’t exist any more
1. Current storage media are: DV tape, SD, memory stick, hard drive, CD/DVD disks, Blu-ray disks, online storage, etc.
It may be a safe course of action to store your digital media on a number of these media types. But as media type changes, you will need to move your digital media on to the new media whenever you think that the old media will no longer readable or reliable.
Each of these has risks. Hard drives are often suggested, but you will need at least three hard drives – two drives backing up the primary drive – and you will need a rigorous backup regime. You will need larger and larger drives as your digital media collection grows.
Devices such as DVD players may no longer work or be purchaseable. New computers cant read old media - ie floppy disks.
You also need to think about safe storage of whatever storage media is being used. In the case of hard drives, one should be stored off site.
2. Creation software
The software used to create your digital media changes just as fast. Digital media files may not be read by newer versions of the software.
Again you will need to move your digital media to new creation software whenever you think that the old creation software will no longer useable (for example, new operating system software or switching to another operating system/computer).
You will need to keep your software up-to-date despite the need to preserve your digital media for your old software. Again you will need to transfer your digital media to the new version of your creation software. This particularly applies to software such as Toast that burns large projects across multiple DVD disks - will the latest version of Toast be able to restore old files? How long will iDVD (and similar apps) exist and be supported?
You might have to re-cast your digital media if you move to new creation software – ie from iMovie to Final Cut.
Remember that some creation software (such as iDVD and Photo–to-Movie) can only save links to the source material. So working an application such as iDVD will make it necessary to store as an archive and not just a project or image file.
Keeping your movies as individual files in .dv, Quicktime, etc formats might be more useful than relying on iMovie, iDVD, created digital media. These formats may have a long life than specialised software and so these movies can be re-used in the future to create new digital media but using new software.
In conclusion, ideally you will have to maintain a regime to keep preserving your digital media. A database to record and monitor where you are up to might be necessary.