Which Codec?

Adobe Premiere Pro

Which Codec?

Posted by Tom Sarratt on March 17, 2015 at 9:41 pm

Dear All,

I am a newbie to CS5 Premier and learning the product. A question:

I am going to capture some UMatic and BetaCam (NTSC), and I need to archive the material for long term storage. The focus is going to be on editing the video someday in the future. My concern right now is to capture the video in the best quality possible and then burn to media (ie Dual Layer BD burn of a computer file – not as a playable BD disk). The material is live motion video – no computer graphics.

From reading in the various forums, I now understand that the use of a Codec for encoding my video for storage could create problems in the future, such as compatibility with future editing tools, and/or format support.

Therefore, my question: which codec would guarantee the least trouble from a compatibility perspective, and yet retain the best possible quality of my video product?

I wanted to avoid the use of such terms as “lossless” and “uncompressed” as I perceive the real issue is more “future compatiblity” than anything else.

THANK YOU

Oki Pienandoro replied 11 years, 5 months ago 4 Members · 3 Replies
3 Replies

Joe Barta iv
March 18, 2015 at 1:45 pm

Our current bet for long-term storage is ProRes, but no one really knows the future.

Joe

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Daniel Waldron
March 19, 2015 at 8:42 pm

I would also vote for ProRes. It’s been around for nearly a decade and works well in most editing applications, and I see no reason it won’t continue to.

And it’s “visually lossless.” 😉
Oki Pienandoro
March 21, 2015 at 1:12 pm

How long “future” are we talking about, 10,30,50+ years ?
Other issue that you might look is your current scheme to store them as DualBD.
Will there be a player capable of retrieving from the disc in 10,30+ years ?
Another thing. I’ve seen a BD disc less than 5 year is degrading, unplayable, etc.

In a really-really long archival purpose, your safest bet is actually keep them updated with the current generation, thus negating the needs for concern whether it can be retrieved properly (codec wise).

This require you to store them in lossless whether you like it or not, since this approach requiring you to re-trancode in perfect copy again-and again-and again in the future.
Sure, ProRes is recommended due the versatility in the past 10 years or so, but as an archival purpose, and the nature they were not true lossless, i don’t use it.

I also store many video for archival, and i keep updating (read=transcode) to the current gen, from huffyuv (past) then lagarith (past) to Ut video codec (current).

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Sorry for the english, not native speaker.

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