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Archival codec
Anyone have any advice on a codec that I should use for archival purposes? In a perfect world, naturally as little compression as possible. Animation codec would be great, but the files are, of course, unwieldy. Generally the final delivery for these are for the web, anywhere between 320×240 and 640×480, usually in H.264 codec, and rarely one will go to DVD. – so maybe looking for something that will split the diff between Animation and H.264. Would something like MJPEG A or B be a viable option? ProRes not an option as not all members of the team have access to FCP6 (although is this codec available to others?)
So obviously I’ll be giving up a bit of quality in exchange for the smaller sizes, I realize that. It’s a trade-off I’m willing to take to a degree.
Thoughts?
Tom
(also posted this over @ the After Effects forum..) -
2 Replies
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Most stock houses use Photo-JPEG for their footage.
Do some tests, comparing P-JPEG at 89/91% with the same at 100%, with Animation to see what you find to be an acceptable quality loss.
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Archiving is quite different from backing up.
You don’t archive compressed or encoded footage, you are just backing it up for duplicate storage. The only thing you can truly archive, by definition (see a site on preservation technologies and sciences), is the camera original because you need to preserve the original so can do something else to it as future technologies become available.Archiving is further complicated by what medium to use. Videotape is still viable after 30 years but film is still around after more than 100 years. In 10 years you may not be able to find a working DVD player.
bogiesan
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