[Taburineagle]

What I’ve been doing with my nature projects when I archive them is to compress everything to H.264 format – it’s not *lossless*, but it does a somewhat good job of keeping much of the original quality IMHO… The way that I work, I usually have more than one camera angle as part of a feed to archive, and I like to keep “Day edit DVDs”, in case I want to use a clip for later that I wouldn’t have used as part of a normal day’s features. I sync all of the angles together, compress all of them to H.264, seperate every video and audio track, and then take them back into QuickTime Pro and add them to a reference movie, one by one. Doing this, I have angles, sound tracks and graphic elements that I can just turn on or off when I want to see the other angle, etc., and the compression does a somewhat good job (MUCH better than MPEG2 DVDs, because if you’re making a strictly DVD-Video disc, every angle you add reduces the quality of the others – not good for archival purposes) at keeping the original quality. Once I make a DVD-Data copy of the files (the raw video, audio and etc. files, as well as QuickTime reference movies to both a multiangle multiplex version which shows all of the angles playing at one time – which does NOT work when playing from the DVD, but works very well on the HDD, and a normal one-angle version), I copy the entire directory to a drive I have set up to hold raw feeds. That way, I have about 40-50 minutes of video and audio (usually about 2 15 minute video tracks and 2 sound files) fitting into the space of a DVD. That may be kind of overkill for what you’re trying to do, but that’s what I’ve been doing, and it works for me – if you have QuickTime Pro 7, just try taking a minute long clip and compressing it in H.264 – it may work, it may not, for what you’re doing…