Posted by dvwool on 12/21/06 07:19

Thanks for the replies everyone!

I'll check with some local companies to see if I can find someone to
partner with. It's likely that we will contract with several companies
to reduce the conversion time. At this point, I'm really interested in
determining who can do it, how, and cost. Then I can show the guys in
ties what the bottom line is.

I'm not sure that going the DVD route will suit us... my pipe dream is
to get all of the footage onto a storage array... then ultimately to
build a content database. I definitely see us using (er, burning out)
many temps on this! ;-)

Cheers,
-Dave


nobody special wrote:
> For this kind of volume, unless you need it done really fast, your most
> cost-efficient solution is to buy a playback deck and the realtime
> recorder of your choice and burn these to 1-hour DVD-R in your own
> place. If you lack the staff you can hire temps or local teens or
> elederly or someone from a sheltered workshop to process the tapes into
> disks. It is not the kind of job that requires an EE degree or 4 years
> of college. You can't transfer umatic any faster than real-time anyway,
> no matter what. The only way to go faster is to gang up multiple sets
> of machines in parallell, and the costs for that are prohibitive beyond
> two sets... Any solution that requires an intermediate step to hard
> drive is never going to work fast enough to suit your volume. IMO.
>
> My shop had a similar situation and that's what we have: a temp, a
> deck, and a Panasonic DVD recorder buring to DVD-R at the highest
> quality setting. Even though it's mpeg-2 it is still better than the
> umatic already. He reloads the tapes and disks on the half-hour or
> hour, labels and catalogs them, and does other office busy work in
> between.

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