Technical Question ? Backing up Camera Masters

[peter@video-xtra.com]

I had dozens of hours of unedited camera master recording on Umatic tape, but recently copied it all to DVD and got rid of the Umatics.

I now have it all stored on DVD-R but would like to back it up to hard drive. I bought a large capacity external drive for this purpose, but need to know how best to back up the material. As it will eventually be edited with Premiere or similar, maybe it?s best to back it up in MPEG format. I presume these files could be simply imported to Premiere without further conversion, or could be played using Media Player or similar.

What software would I need, or is there a better way of achieving my objective? Any help would be appreciated. Thanks

Peter

[Riley]

What are your files on DVD-R raw AVI or compressed files mpeg 2 ?