I have a lot (1000 hours) SD video on rapidly deteriorating the band I want to digitize and archive.  Should I export to AVI, MPEG2, H264 or...?

It's my first post, so if I get this is wrong, I apologize.  My question is as stated above...

Hi Rob,

For DVCAM tapes, I highly recommend Firewire capture in the form of .avi files DV, which would be 100% lossless - essentially a transfer of data from a tape to hard drive - SAME data to different media. Doesn't get better than that. And keep backup tapes - I have a lot of DV and DVCAM tapes that are 15 years old and over and still read perfectly. Being digital, that signal will not be weird as old VHS tapes... you have a photo or not.

For analog tapes, then use the MXO2 capture with Matrox MPEG-2 I-Frame codec, which is intra-frame with 4:2:2 color and you can increase the data rate slider as needed to meet your needs for quality. Of course, you have the option of uncompressed with Matrox, but probably exaggerated and takes tons more storage space.

What about H.264, it is certainly the most ubiquitous format around in recent years, but it is "lossy" - highly compressed, so I would not really call this archiving for so many info is thrown when encoding. I think that the color will be 4:2:0, for example, most interframe encoding (not full images). If your MXO2 has the option 'MAX' that supports capture directly in H.264 format, for what it's worth.

The problem with the Matrox codec, or similar, is that it requires a PC with Matrox codec installed. But you will encounter in this type of situation regardless, years in advance. You might find yourself transcoding your entire library for a newer, better codec in 5 years, who knows.

The only media with proven longevity are film. I have 8mm films of the 1940s who plays back perfect on the original Kodak Brownie projector that Grandpa passed. Try to reproduce any digital recent or size of band in the 1970s. HA!

Something to consider about the archiving of your video library in digital - even if you have a RAID configuration with redundancy, you'll want all the files that are duplicated on another drive to safety. Readers can and do fail. And readers also die after several years (or less) while just sitting on a shelf, they become just unreadable. You must therefore have a backup AND move the data to newer media after a few years without danger or risk losing everything.

Thank you

Jeff Pulera

Safe Harbor computers

Tags: Adobe Media Encoder

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