• Storage & Archiving

  Archive of Broadcast material in h.264???

  Posted by Tawqeer Mirza on November 12, 2012 at 3:16 pm

  Hi all,

  I’m part of an up and coming International broadcaster and pretty soon we’ll be among the many corporations moving to a complete tapeless environment. We have material from the past 20 years that is sitting on Betacam SP, DvCam and HDCAM that we’ve decided to back-up using ‘APPLE PRO RES 422(LT)’ as the best compromise between storage space and quality preservation (any thoughts welcome on whether this is the best solution).
  For the not-so important material… things we may or may-not use in the future; I’ve been thinking of archiving them in h.264 to save even more space. I would like to ask the International community if this is a wise thing to do. Would conversion of ProRes 422(LT) to h.264 and back lose significant amounts of quality? Or is there a better option out there? Thank you to everyone in advance.

  kind regards,

  Tawqeer

  Tim Jones replied 13 years, 5 months ago 3 Members · 2 Replies
• 2 Replies

• 

  Andrew Rendell

  November 13, 2012 at 10:56 am

  [Tawqeer Mirza] ” Would conversion of ProRes 422(LT) to h.264 and back lose significant amounts of quality?”

  Yes.

  Sorry, but serious quality loss when converting between compression codecs is a fact of life.
• 

  Tim Jones

  December 12, 2012 at 7:47 pm

  Not wanting to sound like a broken record about tape-based archival, and it’s just a thought, but if you can add an LTO drive to your system, you can archive your raw data at full res and never have to worry about loss of fidelity.

  Tim
  —
  Tim Jones
  CTO – TOLIS Group, Inc.
  https://www.productionbackup.com
  BRU … because it’s the RESTORE that matters!

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