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Video Archive Format
I’m looking for the best format to compress video for archival purposes. I end up with around 8 hours of footage per week that needs to be archived out of a Final Cut project, and I’m really not sure the best format/settings to use. In past I’ve just been doing a Quicktime Export of the sequence, but those files come out nearly as large as the source media.
Ideally I’d like to have an archive copy that doesn’t eat up disk space but is good enough to broadcast or potentially imported into a later production if needed.
I’ve toyed around with various MPEG-2 and H.264 settings in compressor, but I really don’t know what I’m doing.
Any suggestions would be greatly appreciated!
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7 Replies
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What is your source format?
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The ‘source’ I’m trying to backup is a Final Cut sequence, the media that is in the sequence could be digitized off any number of sources (MiniDV, DVCAM, HD Recorder, etc).
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“Ideally I’d like to have an archive copy that doesn’t eat up disk space but is good enough to broadcast or potentially imported into a later production if needed”
Ah ha, yes indeed, the perfect CODEC, which not only is capable of the above, but also has the ability to be transcoded to much faster than real-time.
Sadly that codec doesn’t exist.
I’ve dealt with the subject of archiving many times over the years and more often than not the choice comes back to good old tape or cheap spinning disks.
Let’s take your scenario, 8 hours of mixed format HD/SD content per week. Lets say you wanted to encode that to high quality (Broadcast) H.264. With a very fast machine you’d be able to do on average in 16 hours and you’d still notice a drop in quality. How much space would you save? not much probably.
And H.264 is currently state of the art for efficiency.
Then, when you want to edit with it at some point in the future, you’ll probably want to transcode it back to a format that’s easier to edit with, like Prores taking more time.
The conclusion with nearly all cases like yours is to keep the video in the native digitised format and store on inexpensive spinning disk, storage is so cheap these days, it’s kind of a no brainer.
Broadcasters tend to back up in the native format to robotic data tape libraries.
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Please post back saying what solved your problem. It could help others, and saying ‘thanks’ is free! -
Completely agree. It’s the cheapest solution, and takes less time. Plus, when you need the footage or project again, you haven’t already degraded your sources footage.
Everyone tackles this differently. At one point, CBS had a contract with (now out of business) Southwest Television for sports archiving. They were doing encoding to MPEG2 and storing footage to DVD discs. Hopefully they kept the bitrate fairly high.
Videographer/Editor
Creative Director
Union Digital, Inc.
https://www.uniondigitalmedia.com -
Storing things in the original format definitely makes the most sense. I was hoping there was some compression codec that might get me really good quality and cut down the filesize. I think I’ll pick up another 1.5 TB hard drive and see how long that takes to fill up.
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What you might want to do is incorporate the cost of a drive for each project, that way you have a separate drive for each project. We do that, and it works out well, and makes it easy to grab what we need later instead of searching through files that aren’t related to the project we’re on.
Videographer/Editor
Creative Director
Union Digital, Inc.
https://www.uniondigitalmedia.com -
What about ProRes. We’ve been recording events on Ki Pro’s and storing them as ProRes 422 QT files.
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