• Avid Media Composer

  Best codec for archiving old dv projects

  Posted by Eric Olson on July 4, 2011 at 1:46 pm

  Hi all,

  I’m looking to archive some old Avid projects that were shot/edited at DV resolution. Afterward, I’m plan to erase the original project and corresponding media to free up drive space (and also, I have an old version of Avid that is no longer supported and I worry that with one more service pack upgrade I won’t be able to access these projects. No biggie as I now work in FCP and Premiere anyways.) The the bottom line is these need to be very high-quality masters.

  I’ve experimented around with Photo JPEG and MJPEG which gave good results. I’ve also tried export “same as source” which seemed to give me a file that’s around the same size as the JPEG codecs. This is my preference because its super simple and you don’t have to deal PAR issues or interlace issues.

  My question is: is there any quality loss using “same as source” when dealing with DV projects? DV is compressed so does AVID recompress when exporting DV? Is quality lost? To my eye the exports looked perfectly fine, but I’d like to be sure because this is probably the last time I’ll take a look at these projects.

  Thanks,

  Eric

  Hector Berrebi replied 14 years, 10 months ago 3 Members · 2 Replies
• 2 Replies

• 

  Akbar Basha

  July 10, 2011 at 7:05 am

  Go with DV codec.. If you are fine with file size you can very well use the “Same as source” option..
• 

  Hector Berrebi

  July 10, 2011 at 7:38 am

  [Eric Olson] ” is: is there any quality loss using “same as source” “

  No

  That’s why its called same as source

  It’s a rewrap, DV codec goes out of MXF and into QT, not encoding or compressing.

  Are you exporting final sequences?
  Or planning to consolidate?

  Hector Berrebi
  prePost Consulting

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