This question is to share my experience as well as ask for suggestions for better methods.

Along with 2 friends, I completed the making of a short documentary film in 2006. Clip is at: http://www.youtube.com/mediamotioninvision

The film was edited in Adobe Premiere Pro 1.5 on Windows XP. More details and screenshot here: http://www.flickr.com/photos/smilingrobbie/1350235514/

( note this is not intended to be a plug, we've moved on from this initial learning curve project ;) )

The film is in 4:3 standard definition 720x576 PAL format.

As well as retaining the final 30minute film, I wanted to keep all original files that assembled together to make the film.

The footage was 83.5Gb

So I archived them to over 20 4.7Gb DVD recordables in the original .avi format (i.e. data DVD-ROM format, NOT DVD-Video Mpeg2)

Some .avi DV video files were larger than 4.7Gb so I used 7-zip to split them ( here is a guide as to how to do that: http://www.linglom.com/2008/10/12/how-to-split-a-large-file-using-7-zip/ )

To recombine them, a dos shell command like this would do that: copy /b file.avi.* file.avi would do the job, where .* is a wild card to include all the split parts e.g. 001, 002...00n assuming they are all in the same directory path folder. file.avi is the recombined file identical to the original.

Later on, I bought a LG BE06 LU10 USB 2.0 Super-multi Blu-ray burner and archived the footage to 2 (two) x 50Gb BD-R DL discs. Again in the original format, written as files to a BD-R in the BD-R BD-ROM UDF format readable by PC/Mac etc, NOT Blu-ray video/film format.

This seems to be a good solution for me, because:

• the archive is in a robust, reasonably permanent, non-volatile medium, i.e. DVD recordable / Blu-ray (debates about stability of optical media organic chemical dye compounds/substrates aside)

• the format of the archive is accessible by open source tools or just plain Windows Explorer and it's not in a proprietary format

I just thought I'd ask folks for their experience on better methods, if such exist.