What is the best format to save files in for archive purposes?

Avid Media Composer

What is the best format to save files in for archive purposes?

Posted by John Hatcher on January 15, 2011 at 2:38 am

Hi guys,

I have a load of old VHS tapes, mostly family stuff, and a bunch of mini-DV standard def tapes that I want to dump off onto hard drive or DVD-R.

Anyone know, once captured, what to export at that will not compress so that if I want to edit these things in the future at some point, I won’t have any more loss of quality?

I know DVDs aren’t reliable over time, but even if I put this stuff on hard drives, I need to know whether it’s better to export as an uncompressed avi, DNxD, uncompressed QT or whatever is the best.

Thanks!
John

John Hatcher replied 15 years, 1 month ago 2 Members · 4 Replies
4 Replies

Jeff Greenberg
January 16, 2011 at 3:08 am

DNxHD is only an HD codec – your stuff is all SD.

You want it perfect? All of these are generally the same:

Avid Uncompressed 1:1
QuickTime Uncompressed
QuickTime Animation
AVI uncompressed

Advantage of storing it as Avid MXF files? You can pop it into an MC and go
Everything else will permit use in other editorial tools.

It’s VHS and truthfully, nobody will notice? If you’re comfortable with using Avid’s Codecs, which should be around for a long time – you could probably get away with 3:1 or 2:1 and never see a difference.

Best,

Jeff G
John Hatcher
January 19, 2011 at 3:26 pm

Thanks a bunch Jeff! My next question would be, how is the best way to make those huge files span DVD-R disks? I know you can do it with WinRAR, but if there’s a better way, I’m all ears. 🙂
Jeff Greenberg
January 20, 2011 at 2:48 am

The real issue in spanning DVDs is that the DVD may go bad. They’re limited to 4.3 or 8.6 gigs (about the same length of minutes)

I’d really suggest: a) some sort of file format that includes a set of parity files (google. .PAR) that you store with the media. This way, if a file goes bad, the PAR files could possibly rebuild the media. The other suggestion I ‘d have is to move to a blue ray disc which has much larger sizes (especially if you decide to go uncompressed.)

Best,

Jeff G

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Avid Cert. Instructor DS/MC
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John Hatcher
March 9, 2011 at 11:38 pm

Hi Jeff,
So being that Avid MC still uses AVI 1.0 thus you can export anything over 2 gigs, I’ll go with the export to Quicktime Movie and NOT use the avid codec. I’ve imported stuff I’ve exported that way and laid it in the timeline under the original, then toggled the monitor back and forth between video tracks and stuff does look exactly the same as the original.

If you think that Quicktime Movie export is the way to go, I’ll go ahead because I’m thinking that too is the only real future proof way to go.

Thanks again!

I’ll be sending it to Bluray too. 🙂

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