Tim Vasquez
EF5
- Joined
- Dec 4, 2003
- Messages
- 3,411
Does anyone here offload their video regularly onto the hard drive? If so, what is your preferred video format for preserving the footage?
I'm at the point now where I really need to get all my footage off my Hi-8 and VHS tapes before they deteriorate. I had originally intended on storing these on DVD, but MPEG2 is not so great and anything beyond 1 hour introduces compression artifacts. Blu-Ray media is still a bit expensive, though I see prices have come down a lot over the past few months (maybe cheaper now per GB than a hard drive; I still need to look at this). Hard drives are really cheap and can be used as play devices on PS3s and DVD players, however, and are easier to duplicate for backups than a stack of discs. So that may be the direction I'll go.
The big question is formats. Is the H.264 codec up to snuff? I'm thinking of encoding everything into MP4/H.264. The raw AVI DV streams are still far too bloated to try preserving, and I don't happen to have an LTO-4 unit and a pile of cartridges sitting in the closet. Since the tape rips come in AVI/DV format, I'm going to try using FFMPEG to do the conversions to MP4... that way I can make the command into a batch file and do every tape in one keystroke.
Tim
I'm at the point now where I really need to get all my footage off my Hi-8 and VHS tapes before they deteriorate. I had originally intended on storing these on DVD, but MPEG2 is not so great and anything beyond 1 hour introduces compression artifacts. Blu-Ray media is still a bit expensive, though I see prices have come down a lot over the past few months (maybe cheaper now per GB than a hard drive; I still need to look at this). Hard drives are really cheap and can be used as play devices on PS3s and DVD players, however, and are easier to duplicate for backups than a stack of discs. So that may be the direction I'll go.
The big question is formats. Is the H.264 codec up to snuff? I'm thinking of encoding everything into MP4/H.264. The raw AVI DV streams are still far too bloated to try preserving, and I don't happen to have an LTO-4 unit and a pile of cartridges sitting in the closet. Since the tape rips come in AVI/DV format, I'm going to try using FFMPEG to do the conversions to MP4... that way I can make the command into a batch file and do every tape in one keystroke.
Tim