Compression codec for archival documentary

[Mark Smith]

Storage:

In general everything that is on tape is now digitized on drives. I have the original tapes and machines to play back all formats, though some stuff from the late 80’s is now on shaky ground playback wise. Any way its all digitized and stored on some large format 3.5″ drives. EVERYTHING on drives is backed up to LTO 5 tape at this point as drives can and will fail over time. By everything I mean all tape based media and file based media post 2005.
The X Library itself is currently on a 4 drive raid 5 thunderbolt drive that is 3 TB. The project will likely be done in chunks, so once one chunk is done, I’ll out put pro res and archive the library to LTO tape, wipe the drive and move on.

That’s the big picture. I do take a lot of comfort in the fact that I have LTO back ups of all files. I’ve been burned by drives a few times.

[Joe Marler]

[Lucy Slavinsky] “By “final product” do you mean distribution? I am not sure if I understand it fully. The film is intended for broadcast, festivals. Further distribution strategy is probably streaming or downloading. How would you handle the interlacing issue?”

There are two frequent issues with handling large amounts of older SD material for 16:9 progressive distribution: (1) 4:3 aspect ratio and (2) Interlacing.

You often will have a mix of original camera-native material and other content which has been processed, rendered or cut up by unknown tools. Depending on the processing sequence this can “bake in” certain interlacing, window boxing or pillar boxing effects. In reviewing the content it’s a good idea to try and assess if this has happened and where possible backtrack to the original camera-native content, even if this entails re-capturing data off tape.

DVD distribution further complicates this since the playback methods could be a software player, hardware player, etc — each of which can have different handling of de-interlacing and wide screen content. You basically have to check it on a bunch of different playback devices. If you won’t be using DVD, at least that part is simplified.

There is no single procedure for handling this. You just need to be aware and watch for interlace “combing” artifacts on horizontal moving subjects on both original content and your final rendered content, also undesirable window boxing, then make adjustments to handle these if present. You will frequently see videos where this was not handled properly and interlace artifacts or window boxing got baked in and the playback system can’t undo that.

In general FCPX will do the right thing when conforming content with mixed aspect ratios or interlacing as you add it to the project. However it’s best to do a periodic test export and evaluate how it looks — before adding a hundred clips that all must be then fixed. The “fixing” could be as simple as changing the field dominance or deinterlace checkbox settings under Inspector>Info for that clip. Unfortunately it can be a matter of trial and error. If not discovered early you could have already added a transition between two clips with different characteristics that then must be removed to fix the problem.

Another good way to minimize some image quality issues of older 4:3 NTSC content is using split screen. There are various split screen plugins for FCPX. Here is a MacBreak Studio on one of them:
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=dAaspNUSSkU

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