[Hidden-tech] Video Codecs for long-term storage

[Will Loving]

Here¹s a question for the video mavens out there. My son goes to PVPA
(Pioneer Valley Performing Arts Charter Public School) and starting last
year, we began video recording some of the performances. We would like,
eventually, to establish a viewing archive in the library of past
performances at the school and are trying to think about short term and
long-term storage and video formats.

There are two main issues, viewing and storage.

Most of the video we are shooting at the moment is in AVCHD format, which
for a performance under two hours will just fit on a dual-layer DVD.
However, we usually want to edit that video to clean it up, add titles,
credits, directors notes, etc. In the process it all get¹s transcoded to DV
.mov format in iMovie which triples the size. Since Blu-ray is not an option
and the DV format is just to large for reasonable storage at this time, we
need to figure out two things: the best video format to save to for
long-term backup storage that will fit on a DL DVD, so under 8GB, and the
best format to save to for HD based storage on a viewing station in the
library.

For storage purposes on a DL DVD, there is no way that I¹m aware of to
easily transcode the edited video back to AVCHD. iMovie can export via
QuickTime to various formats and we could also use Handbrake to render the
edited and exported DV file down to something under 8GB, but I still don¹t
know what the best format for that would be. I¹m pretty sure Handbrake has a
sizing option where you simply say, render to 7.8GB and it will do the
amount of compression to get it there, but is that the best way?

As for the viewing station, the same format that gets it to under 8GB might
be fine in terms of current available HD space. Over time HD space will only
get cheaper and more available but right now we can¹t be storing 30-40GB
files. The related question I have is whether there are differences in
format that would affect viewing from a NAS vs a local HD? Is there some
format would be better over the network or should we perhaps have two
versions ­ high-res for local and lower-res for network viewing?

Comments?

Will

Will Loving, President
Dedication Technologies, Inc.

-- 

William M. Loving
Dedication Technologies, Inc.
7 Coach Lane
Amherst, MA 01002-3304   USA
will at dedicationtechnologies.com
Tel: +1 413 253-7223   (GMT ­5)
Fax: +1 206 202-0476

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