Multimedia: DVD Media Longevity/Quality
Thermal printer for labeling.
by CybaGirl - 4/16/05 5:27 AM In reply to: Labels are a well known problem. NEVER use labels as by KiddpeatOr if you must label your DVD's CD's get yourself one of those thermal printers. Casio makes a good but cheap thermal printer designed for DVD's and CD's. Or if you have plenty of cash you can lash out and buy yourself a full color thermal DVD CD printer.
BTW I personally only use TDK DVD's for anything that is important to me and I have never had a problem with retriving any information from them. This brand is not as cheap as some of the others on the market. But then again what value do you put on your work and memories?
DVD Longevity - disk labels
by Coli - 4/16/05 12:21 PM In reply to: DVD Longevity by ptarga8Which reminds me - I had a music CD my brother burnt which I had great trouble reading. Mostly I couldn't read it, miraculously one day I could, later again I could not.
He had made a nice printed label for it but it wasn't exactly centered... so I started scraping one edge to try and make it more balanced - didn't help.
Then I washed the CD.... suddenly it became playable.
The glue for the label was water soluable - and with the label removed I had no more problems.
I think contraction of the label had warped the disk.
Wetting it caused it to expand... and removing it solved the problem for good.
More likely it was off center and made the CD wobble in
by Kiddpeat - 4/16/05 12:31 PM In reply to: DVD Longevity - disk labels by Colithe drive. It's hard to believe a label could cause a CD to warp. Even more so for DVDs.
A few issues
by Gsteele - 4/16/05 10:29 AM In reply to: DVD Media Longevity/Quality by timwerxTwo main issues here, I think. One regards quality of media, the other archival storage life. The two are related in a way other than you'd expect.
In the first case, media quality varies significantly - dyes, substrates, reflective layers, birefringence of the polycarbonate, manufacturing tolerances, etc. Years ago, Mitsui Petrochemical released a "gold standard" media that was very high quality, but costly and thus unpopular. We suffered with 3M media, I have seen 2 year old Sony media with surface rot that had to be replaced by Sony before use, HP media that had lot failures but was generally good, etc. (i.e., certain production lots were good, while others had problems.
A big problem early on was concentricity. If a disk was eccentric (center hole vs. radius to a track spiral), you could experience both write and read failures by exceeding the servo gain of the drive tracking mechanism. This becomes more pronounced the faster the disk spins, of course. It's a challenge to maintain a laser position of +- .1 micron over excursions of several hundred microns of eccentricity per spin when the disk spins fast. Sometimes removing and replacing the disk would help because it would reposition on the drive spindle, and the disk and drive spindle eccentricities would cancel out instead of accentuate each other.
I've also had great success cleaning both CD's and DVD's with Windex, since the solvent is mild, evaporates quickly, and removes both water-soluble and greasy surface irregularities.
High quality media is worth the money, but it is a trial and error, lot-based process that determines a given box of media's quality.
With respect to longevity, however, (as opposed to data integrity from the get go), the issue really is that we have longevity of digital data by virtue of its digitization, not the life of the media on which it is written. Digital data can be transferred from one medium to another without degradation, if the transfer is done before either there is no longer a reader or before the built in EDAC can no longer correct errors that have grown on the surface.
This is markedly different from analog, of course, which in many cases suffers about a 2-3 dB loss in signal to noise ratio each time it is transferred. Think of a 20th generation cassette tape or a photocopy of a phototcopy of a . . . you get the idea.
But digital necessitates copying as we cross generations to preserve its quality, which is a different mindset from the old concept of "archival", which was media-preservationist based. Special papers, films, environments, etc. were the province of the archivist of old; periodic migration to newer media is the province of the modern digital archivist.
So be ready to move your data (thanks to hard disks, that's not so hard to do) to each succeeding generation if you plan to keep it. Funny, we used to "archive" data from hard disk to optical in the old days when hard disk was expensive. Now we use it as the archival highway to preserve the data being outdated on optical disk.
Archive Video In Two Storage Mediums
by lkelvin456 - 4/30/05 9:01 PM In reply to: A few issues by GsteeleThe best way for me to preseve video footage (with the experience of reading up on this in numerous books and talking to a few people who do this semi-pro). I would recommend that you record onto DVD-R at only 1x speed, so that the normal disc error rates are barely visible on a software based disc error detection software.
Obviously, the higher the speed you record, the higher the error readings are. Which in turn relies more on the DVD player to smooth them out more. Too high a figure makes the reading of the disc unreadible at worst/jumpy or pixelated at best.
Once you have burned your DVD, encode your project from within you DVD authoring application (Adobe Premiere is the best to use if you can afford it) and encode it to MPEG2 (which is DVD compliant). Save this file to a size no lower than 800MB for a full DVD video.
Once you have stored this on a external hard disk, you will also find it much easier to copy again so that you don't have to render the movie again. Because you have stored it onto a hard disk and filled it up. Just unplug it, box it and store it in a filling cabnet with a lock on it to keep it safe.
You can get 500GB FireWire 400/800 drives for about £350+ and will serve you better in the long run if you also worried about the standard FireWire 400 being outdated by the newer FireWire 800.
Windex on DVD's?
by KsMimi - 5/4/05 9:14 AM In reply to: A few issues by GsteeleDoes Windex really not harm Dvds? My daughter had a cleaner kit that erases scratches but I don't know what the solution is or what the name of the kit is. It is something like Disk Doctor. I would like to find some thing readily avaiable to clean my cd's and dvd'swith that will not harm them. If any knows of anything please let me know. If you want to reply to me directly e-mail me at phale@esc18.net
Yup. Read what its made of and...
by R. Proffitt
- 5/4/05 9:29 AM
In reply to: Windex on DVD's? by KsMimi
It's not what you want near dyes and thin coatings.
Bob
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