Archiving video digitally -- formats?

[Tim Vasquez]

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

 

[John Wetter]

MP4/H.264 is the way to go.

 

[JPontari]

MP4/H.264 is the way to go.

+1

H.264 is the future

 

[Brandon Headley]

+1 for MP4/H.264

Best Quality with smaller file sizes. I use it for everything I archive.

 

[Tim Vasquez]

Thanks all. I had actually begun thinking a little about Xvid/DivX since most DVD players already support those formats natively, but I guess that's a step backward. I certainly have noticed that there is an industry trend toward H.264. I haven't looked to see whether any DVD players support it yet, but my PS3 certainly does, and I suppose I had better plan on the future. H.264 it is. Now I just need to experiment with encoding and bit rates.

Tim

 

[Brandon Headley]

As far as bit rate goes. I use 2500kbps for SD and 5000kbps for 720HD. For 1080HD I would use 6000kbps. I don't store in 1080 currently, but soon will be going to that, since Youtube and Vimeo have both switched to Full HD.

 

[Mark Blue]

Hopefully your processor is up to the task as this type of encoding is very processor intensive. ATI has led the way in offloading some of processing required with the H.264 codec to the graphics card, especially in the 5XXX series they released a few months ago. I've often wondered what kind of quality improvement one can achieve when the source material is standard def and the H.264 codec is primarily designed for hi def sources. The only reason I mention this is that you referred to the Hi-8 and VHS tapes as the source material in the original post. I do agree that hard drive storage is becoming so cheap these days that you can hardly go wrong when a 2 TB drive with 32 megs of cache and a 3.0 Gb/s SATA interface can be had for slightly north of a buck fifty. Good luck with your project!

 

[Billy Griffin]

If you don't mind me asking, what software are you folks using to render your videos to H.264? Thanks in advance!

 

[John Wetter]

H.264 is not designed only for HiDef. The whole point to the protocol is to cover everything from your cell phone up to 1080P.

For doing the render, I personally use compressor as part of Final Cut Studio. But, there are also plug-ins for Premiere, Pinnacle and others on the Windows side.