Archival concern about ProRes

[Zane Barker]

[Shane Ross] “Just as an FYI, the Library of Congress archives EVERYTHING onto film. Every video they want to archive is archived on film. And, they have literally EVERY kind of deck you can imagine there. Multiple decks, to ensure they can play this all back.”

Perfect from now on I will only be doing work for the library of congress.

**Hindsight is always 1080p**

[Jeremy Garchow]

Reminds me of this April fools joke from NPR:

https://www.npr.org/templates/text/s.php?sId=1216161&m=1

[Walter Soyka]

[Eben Shapiro] “I was wondering if there is a non-proprietary codec that I could transcode ProRes 422 to without losing any information. The archivist where I work says ProRes 422 isn’t archival because you need final cut to play it.”

I am sympathetic to this concern in theory, but in practice, I agree with the others — use the most sensible option today, and maintain it in the future as conditions change.

I’d be very curious to hear what your archivist suggests using. DPX sequences? JPEG2000? What kind of storage?

As an aside, the LoC system Shane was referring to was also covered in Creative COW Magazine:
https://magazine.creativecow.net/article/the-library-of-congress-unlocks-the-ultimate-archive-system

Walter Soyka
Principal & Designer at Keen Live
Motion Graphics, Widescreen Events, Presentation Design, and Consulting
RenderBreak Blog – What I’m thinking when my workstation’s thinking
Creative Cow Forum Host: Live & Stage Events

[Max Frank]

We archive everything to Unobtanium Holographic Reels.

Works great.

W

[Paul Jay]

Zip and RAR are great for archiving too 😛

[Eben Shapiro]

That’s what I get for being melodramatic.

[Eben Shapiro]

Hi Walter,

The archivist doesn’t have any suggestions about this. He just has a knee-jerk reaction whenever I say ‘proprietary’ or mention Niagara Falls. There was a report done by the Dance Heritage Coalition where they concluded that JPEG2000 is best because it uses lossless compression. Do you think I should go with this?

Thank you,

Eben

[Walter Soyka]

[Eben Shapiro] “The archivist doesn’t have any suggestions about this.”

I don’t mean to be snarky, but isn’t that his job?

[Eben Shapiro] “There was a report done by the Dance Heritage Coalition where they concluded that JPEG2000 is best because it uses lossless compression.”

There are a lot of very good reasons to consider JPEG2000. It’s an ISO standard. It supports several color spaces, loads of metadata, alpha channels, lossy or lossless wavelet compression, and progressive decoding (if the viewer receives less than the full data stream, they can still see the entire image, but at reduced resolution).

This does not necessarily solve the problems of what container (Quicktime? Image sequence? Motion JPEG 2000?) or physical storage system to use.

[Eben Shapiro] “Do you think I should go with this?”

I don’t think you’ll really get much benefit from you archive unless you design (or purchase) an entire archival system. How will you store the media? How will you verify it? How will you catalogue it? How will you search it? How will you view it?

Cliff notes version: JPEG2000 rocks, but a practical archival implementation requires some serious infrastructure.

Walter Soyka
Principal & Designer at Keen Live
Motion Graphics, Widescreen Events, Presentation Design, and Consulting
RenderBreak Blog – What I’m thinking when my workstation’s thinking
Creative Cow Forum Host: Live & Stage Events

[Eben Shapiro]

Hi Walter,

Thank you for your response. I’m tempted to talk about video archival infrastructure but I don’t want to go beyond the scope of my question. In this particular instance I think I’ll keep the prores and make a JPEG2000 copy for safe keeping.

Thank you once again for your help,

Eben