Codecs and Containers

[Vince Becquiot]

That’s the issue many of us often ask ourselves and I don’t think there is one right answer.

Given how cheap storage has become, I find it easier to simply drag an entire project to 2 hard drives, main and backup, than try to export each clip to something else. If you were to count your hourly rate, you would probably find out you could just buy a couple of drives and still go boating for the weekend with the hours you saved.

Also be sure to bill your clients for archival if they want you to be responsible for it.

You can also use the project manager to export to a trimmed project which will usually be rather small in size.

Most of the formats used by cameras and camcorders are mostly better left as is since they are already very efficiently compressed.

If you do want to compress, H.264 using the Sorenson Squeeze software will likely give you the best quality vs size. Next in my book would be Motion Jpeg for high end archiving.

Finally, if you a budget for it, LTO tapes are now the way to go for long term reliable archival.

Vince Becquiot

Kaptis Studios
San Francisco – Bay Area

[Mark Hollis]

Vince is dead on when he talks about charging your clients for project archives. Back in the dark ages before electric lights, people shot on tape. Those field tapes, together with an EDL were the backup for the project and the master tape that was made was the final product. One could reassemble one’s work (to a certain degree) and re-edit the result from those tapes.

We didn’t let a master out of the house unless the client had paid in full, and at that time we’d ship master, field tapes and an EDL disk to the client for their intellectual amusement.

If they wanted us to keep the materials, we’d charge them for storage. We had a pretty small database of videotapes to manage as a result.

Today is the Modern Era, with clients shooting on P2 and XDCam and other “tapeless” formats. They’re totally awesome, unless we cannot read them, then we’re sad.

I’ve a theory that relates to the former way of doing things that goes like this:

I RAID 5 stripe my drives. I ingest all material. I create an edit and I output that edit in a manner that pleases my client, be it HDV (Yuck!), Blu-Ray, regular DVD, HDCam, DVCPro-HD, Varicam or semaphore messages (not serious about the last bit). I give the client all P2 media back. “Here Ya’ go, they’re all yours.” Now, if that client wants to save that material, he or she will keep the P2 cards just as they are and go out and purchase new ones. The client can have the finished master (or all of the finished product) in whatever form he or she wants as long as payment is made in full.

I will back up my Premiere Project.

But it’s not my responsibility to keep the client from destroying all media they brought in.

Just this last weekend, I threw out a 1″ Master tape that I have had for — well too long. Client is long gone. I don’t work in that city any more. Everyone was happy with what I did and they may actually remember what a great job I did. But the client never picked up the master. I hung onto it because I wanted some of the material for a demo reel. I wrote a letter to the client. No response. I called. I sent out carrier pigeons.

Not my responsibility and I cannot charge the client for storage any more.

So if you’re considering backing up material for your own demo reel, go ahead. Everything else ought to be your client’s responsibility and that should be absolutely crystal clear from the start.

Maybe in San Francisco clients like for editors to store their stuff. But I’ll bet Sen Franciscan editors and edit facilities know how to charge them for that service as well as the edit (just a hunch).

What if there were no hypothetical questions?

[Eric Aden]

I appreciate the response, but all in all I would have to call myself a “starving student”. All my projects are academical and for the personal use of me and my friends. I feel like we have gotten a bit off the topic at hand. I am using a SD camera and an old P4 system (Yes Pentium 4). I have not yet made the leap to the other dimension. I guess what I am asking is.

In premiere Pro CS3:

With the codecs available , what is the best one to use for archival footage exporting to the .avi container.

I am aware that different codecs are used for different situations but lets say I want a high (decent)quality .avi that not only can I play on WMP, xbox, and other media players but can also be editable with a file size that is less then an AVI DV file. I know I am asking alot but I’m sure you guys have more experience with this then I do, so I figured I’d ask the best.

[Mike Velte]

AVI is a legacy architecture abandoned by Microsoft in the late 90’s, although Microsoft did wrap their DirectShow codecs (DV) in it.
3 rd party hardware and software vendors have utilized it over the years to package their codecs. The hardware dependent codecs like Matrox and Canopus are variations of DV. Others like DIVX and XVID have used the AVI wrapper but marketing conditions have left them in the dust.
Windows Media Video followed and is still popular, but Silver light is stalled.
H264 is the latest/greatest. MAC folks can play it with a .Mov wrapper and the rest of the world can play it in a .f4v wrapped in a Flash player in any web browser or in a QT player.
AVI is dead…long live Mpeg.

[Jonathan Shohet]

A good option, which vince already suggested, is to archive the entire/trimmed project.

You can export to QT Photo Jpeg,or QT Motion Jpeg in .mov container.
Both are good options in terms of size and quality and Premiere can handle them on the PC.

If you want .avi you can use “Lagarith”
https://lags.leetcode.net/codec.html
It’s a lossless codec that will reduce file size considerably compared to uncompressed avi without any loss of quality.
Just remember you’ll have to install the codec on any PC machine you want to edit/play the avi on.

Also exporting as avi-dv for archiving is not such a bad idea if your original footage is also dv. Premiere will re-encode only parts of the timeline that have effects, transitions, titles, After effects compositions and so on. It’s an acceptable compromise if you are after simplicity and relatively small filesize.

[Mark Hollis]

I’m not sure what a “Pentium D” is, but that’s what I’m using Adobe Premiere Pro 1.5 on. It’s a Dell XPS 600 with 2 Pentium D processors. And the company I work for is pretty much akin to “starving student” presently, as we’re using really old stuff and just trying to make do.

I think your best wrapper is Quicktime Pro and h.264, even though we have an entire library of .AVI material that is 4:1:1 DVCPro standard def resolution. Problem with Quicktime is the gamma shift that occurs when you use that wrapper.

But going forward, I don’t see anything better that anyone else has developed. There’s .WMV (Windows Media 9 is the encoder, even though the current player version is version 10) but I worry about security with any Microsoft product as well as Microsoft’s commitment to the wrapper (they abandoned .AVI as has been mentioned).

What if there were no hypothetical questions?