Wow, like I take 6 months to reply to you and you take just half an hour to reply to my reply :^)

Yeah, Blue-Ray is an option I guess, but one I had kinda discounted on cost grounds for now. Prices will certainly come down. I can remember paying about £200 for a CD writer (4 speed I seem to remember) and about £5 a disk and now both drives and media are at silly low prices, same goes for DVD. BlueRay will get there too.

The only thing I can think of to be honest is to use hard drives to keep the videos on. This will likely get quite expensive, as you would need at least one large drive for “online” use and at least one for backing up – preferably more than one. And for online use I would say it may be best to go for a raid array of some kind. There are some excellent NAS (network attached storage) boxes out there, made by Netgear and others which I would think would do the job. That’s the kind of thing I would invest in myself if I was more serious about video than I am.

I would have a NAS device with as much storage as I could afford – and very importantly a couple of big portable drives which are big enough to back that up to. The backup drives needn’t necessarily be raided – but more than one backup drive so that one can be kept offsite. Even if the offsite backup is just kept at work, or a relatives house it is safer than having all your backups in one place.

If you use the entire 32 gig internal card for one continuous movie for an event such as a wedding and make a disc image of it, how are you going to archive that size image on a DVD? That’s my dilemma. I am on a G5 dual 2.5 Mac. (it’s not broke, why buy a new $3500 machine?) Voltaic works great overnight. In the morning I’m ready to edit in FCS 6. But how do I save the original file?

Good story, though.