It looks like I'll be buying one of the new Sony consumer HD camcorders this Spring.

I'm struggling to decide between HDV and AVCHD. The use of harddrives in the AVCHD camcorders appeals to me.
Here's my question: So, okay, I shoot some footage, but how do I move it off the hard drive and archive it? I mean, how many GB does an hour of AVCHD footage take up?
With my old workflow, I had Hi-8 tapes, which I'd convert to DV. Then I'd make a DVD of the entire footage (2 hours per tape), strictly for indexing I guess you could say. I understand the DVD is not an archival version of the raw footage, since it's compressed, but I always had the tape to resort to. Plus, once the BD/HD-DVD drives come down in price (significantly, I might add), I will be able to re-convert the Hi-8 tapes and store the raw DV footage from each tape on a 30 or 50 GB blu-ray disc.
What will be the archive solution for AVCHD?

Dan

You can burn the AVCHD files onto DVD or BD directly to archive the footage or convert AVCHD to BD and burn.

OK, could you give me a little more clarification? What's BD stand for? and then next question is - how do you burn directly - without compression? Or is that possible? Hmmm....I'm realizing that I have lots of questions here.

What I want to do is archive all my old video and dat audio tapes, and basically everything I have all the way back to cassettes, and maybe even VHS tapes. I've been doing this for soooo long - but I really want to make my collection of interviews and videos available. I figure the Blue Ray disks are big enough, but I really want to do it without compression. Am I nuts, or is this something that everybody is doing, and I just haven't heard about it.

Thanks a bunch for the help,
Milt Lee

BD stands for Blu-Ray disc which currently comes in two flavors, a 25 gig and a 50 gig version. Also, DV and HDV is 13 gigs per hour of footage so you can basically fit nearly 4 hours of RAW HDV footage in one 50 gig Disc and yes it is possible to store HDV and AVCHD without converting and that is what a lot of people are doing.

Although I would have a lot of struggle deciding between the Sony HC7 and the Canon HV20, in your situation you may be interested in the Canon HV20 because it has AV pass true meaning you can hook up an Analog camcorder or a VCR and convert the footage to AVI easily.

If you still want a Sony HC7 or an AVCHD camcorder, you can purchase a breakout box with analog inputs such as S-Video and composite that connects directly into your computer so won’t have to use a camcorder.