best way to compress/archive uncompressed HD footage?

[Harm Millaard]

Get some more hard disks.

[Mike Velte]

You could archive as Windows Media Video 9 or Mpeg 2 but it would take years to do that and reediting would result in a big quality loss.

[Todd Volz]

Thanks for the reply.

What about XviD or DivX? I’ve found that the quality is nearly indistinguishable after compression. But since Premiere Pro hates the X compressors, is there a way to convert XviD or DivX to a format that PP can accept?

thanks again.

[Mike Velte]

While compressing into Windows Media or Xvid/Divx the result looks OK, reediting and recompressing for final output later would result in a serious quality hit.
If you expect the final output to be DVD, you could archive as Mpeg 2 for DVD and use a future solution that would allow for editing and exporting without recompression of those segments that have no effects or titles applied. These solutions for SD exist now, such as the Main Concept Mpeg plug-in for Premiere or Premiere Elements which has a “smart render” function.

[Jim Leonard]

Experiment to see what works best for you. On one machine with highly compressable material NTFS file compression works fine (just make sure you defragment every night and have a fast CPU). On a slower machine, or not as compressable source, use 7-zip or winrar on “normal” or “fast” settings.

I would not recommend transcoding to another format; that invariable causes problems. For example, I’ve had clips go to lossless formats like Lagarith or HuffYUV, only to find that Premiere Pro treats them different (like, interlacing is gone or something). This is NOT a slam against those codecs — I use them heavily in different workflows — but just a warning if you really want to edit the footage again as normal.

But the real solution is another RAID. 1T is not enough for 720p material, even if it’s a single project. Disk is cheap; your time is not!