Storage of raw footage on avi vs mpeg2

[insaprsr]

I have many hours of raw footage on Hi8 tape, would like to digitize and preserve it. AVI would require a huge number of DVD's or hard drive gigs of space. If I boiled it down into mpeg2, would I lose visible quality using today's viewing equipment, as well as into the foreseeable future, using the mpeg2 footage in later edited projects?

[bugster]

If I boiled it down into mpeg2, would I lose visible quality using today's viewing equipment, as well as into the foreseeable future, using the mpeg2 footage in later edited projects?

Not only would you lose some quality (depending on what bitrate you encoded it at), you would also reduce your ability to edit it. Mpeg-2 was never designed to be edited and very few apps do it well, so if oyu will want to edit in the future, stick with avi.

You don't have to use uncopressed avi, something like DV, though still larger than mpeg-2 (at ~13GB/hour) will do fine.

[Ward River]

You have to ask yourself how valuable this footage is to you. DVDs are certainly cheap enough nowadays to make the cost of storing the AVIs on a volumous collection of discs a non-issue for most people.

MPEG2 is clearly not an option for archiving source video you think much of and plan to edit later.

[regular8mm]

Same problem here. I also have a lot of Hi-8mm videos, and also transferred 8mm films, VHS tapes that are self destructing as we speak, and now some miniDV tapes.

My solution is to buy a hard disk tray and save onto removable hard drives. The tray comes with a disk holder and only costs about $25. CompUSA will install it for about the same. Additional disk holders cost about $15 each. Each hard drive gets a holder, they bolt together and are a pain to swap so they stay as is. Hard drives can then be inserted into the PC front, saved to, and pulled out and put onto a shelf. How large a disk to use depends on just what your PC can address or so they tell me at CompUSA.

This solution is also good for using different hard drives with different operating systems. Windows2000 will not use my scanner or digital camera transfer program and I need Win98 again.

I used to transfer movie film to video and customers want unedited uncompressed YUY2 files, a hard drive is about the only way to store them.

[insaprsr]

I have abt 360 hrs of raw Hi8 footage times 13 g/hr = 4680 gigs of material; divided by 4.7 per dvd = too many dvd's to count (almost!) and lots of hard drives or removable drives--pretty discouraging

[Webster]

save onto removable hard drives. ...... a hard drive is about the only way to store them.

A word of caution about using this technique. Hard drives are mechanical devices and are susceptable to mechanical failure (gears froze up, head crash, components burn out). I have had a couple of drives went dead on me using this method. So don't put all your eggs in one basket. Use a couple of different method to be safe. Personally, I found that storing the footages on DV tapes or D8 tapes to be the least expensive way (I do it in parallel with AVI on DVD and AVI on hard drives.) Call me a pessimist, but I feel better that way. I can sleep at night knowing that my kids birthday footages are there for me to show to their girls friend when they grow up to embarrass the hell out of them ............. :P

[edDV]

I have abt 360 hrs of raw Hi8 footage times 13 g/hr = 4680 gigs of material; divided by 4.7 per dvd = too many dvd's to count (almost!) and lots of hard drives or removable drives--pretty discouraging

Do the most important ones now. This time next year we will begin to have Blu-Ray 50GB dual layer DVDR.

If your Hi8 tapes are like mine, after capture to DV about 25-35% of the material can be edited out of the archive.

You will regret archiving to MPeg2 if these tapes have any importance.

[Dasun]

Personally I consider being anti MPEG2 as something of a religion.

In my experience MPEG 2 encoding at 5 to 6 Megs a second is indistinguishable from the original on a 68CM TV and gives 1.5 to 2 hours of storage. As for frame accurate editing, I do that with Ulead video studio with MPEG 2 source and it only reencodes the portion where the effect is, and I set that at 9 Meg a second. Again, on a 68CM TV it is indistuinguishable from the original, although it sometimes mucks up sound synch.

Sure if you do a frame by frame comparison on a computer monitor there is some loss but the viewing reality is that you will not notice it. As for future viewing on large TV, well lets say no home video is likely to look too hot - Analog, DV or MPEG2 sourced. Bear in mind, that all video is compressed in some way or another.

Finally, it is better to have a fairly indistuinguishable from the original copy then have nothing at all. Given that my 8mm video collection is showing a disturbing amount of deteroriation I am currently moving the lot to MPEG2 DVD and it amounts to several hundred hours. I have no plans to go back to oringal source as my experiments have convinced me that a good quality MPEG 2 recording is good enough.

Remember the Armchair test, if you are sipping your favourite beverage on the sofa and can not tell if you are watching the original or copy then the copy is good enough.

[slacker]

I have to agree with Dasun. I have converted about 50 VHS tapes to MPEG2, and edit with Womble Video Wizard. Really, they look awesome. I have started on my Hi-8 tapes (another 50) and they are coming out fine as well. So far, no regrets.

Something to consider... The new $4,000 HIDEF camcorder from Sony records in MPEG2 natively. Given all the other events occurring simultaneously in the TECH industry, I think we're ultimately going VERY COMPRESSED. The codecs will evolve, and the editing and authoring software will be getting MUCH better in the next couple of years.

Having said that, everyone I know is ALSO converting their VHS and Hi-8 tapes over to MiniDV professionally, and storing those tapes in a safe deposit box at the bank for the long term. Me too!

Good luck!

[lenti_75]

if your original video is HI8, mpeg2 at 9000 bitrae gives you the same quality, for your eyes...you don't see the diference, IF the encoding is done right.

who cares about science when your eye can't see the diferrence ?

and of course you can edit mpe2 just fine, use Canopus mpegcraft, and you can edit just fine, without reencoding. SO, where is the loosing quality part if you don't reencode ?

as Dasun said, this is more like a religion to you guys....

[edDV]

For 8mm and VHS no arguement. MPeg can capture all that is there.

Hi8 and S-VHS are gray area. Camcorder originals of important commercial or family video masters should be preserved in high quality MPeg2 (1hr) or transfered to DV if professional level editing is anticipated.

DV masters should be preserved on DV if you care about playback quality on the future generation HDTV sets. Before you commit your collection to DVD MPeg2, view your camera master DV tape on a good HDTV and then view the 8.5Mbps CBR MPeg2. You will see a big difference unless professional level encoders are being used.

True, future standards will be using compression and get excellent results for HDTV. We are talking here about the current DVD standard MPeg2 which is a compromise. MiniDV camcorders easily surpass the maximum quality of DVD.

Future encoders will get much better results from DV masters especially for HDTV and progressive display. The basic rule of any codec is higher quality in gets higher quality output.

It's not about religion it's about personal standards of acceptable quality. Do what you want.

PS: the direct analogy is family photo collections. Some families saw no reason to keep the negatives of those "bownie" box photos. All that is left for future generations is scanning much lower resolution paper prints.

[Dasun]

edDV,

I think your analogy is flawed:
----

PS: the direct analogy is family photo collections. Some families saw no reason to keep the negatives of those "bownie" box photos. All that is left for future generations is scanning much lower resolution paper prints.
---

Mpeg2 still generates 720*576 (PAL land) lines of resolution as does DV, now a print off a negative is a major loss step - more like DV to VCD. The real question is what artifacts are introduced by reencodeing the DV and then generating difference frames between the DCT compressed I frames.

I contend that, if you keep the bit rate up and use a good encoder (like Mainconcept, with VBR, multi-pass and max out the quality options) then the loss is astonishingly little. I know, I encoded an awful HI-8 tape shot by my kids - very shaky shots of other kids in water - and then compared the results frame by frame visually on a computer monitor. With the right encoder, settings, and more than 5 Meg a second, macro-blocks - my main concern - were not visible. In fact, other than a slight colour shift, there was very little to pick between the encode and the original. I frames were pretty much Identical and B frames where only very slightly more blurry. On a TV the difference is not noticable - 68CM Sony Wega with RGB input from a Pioneer DVD player. On very low light scenes mosquito noise seems to be the only issue and it is tolerable, other than that from my sofa it looks the same.

I expect all my home video's from DV to 26 year old VHS will look not to good on a HDTV, but that is a function of the resolution of SDTV not necessarily the MPEG encoding process - if done right, I consider it a fine archival source for display and editing.

However, if you want MPEG2 quality then it takes time. On my 2.3 GHZ Celeron, I take 4-5 hours to do 1 hour but - hey! - I need to sleep and work and the computer does not!

As for the religion bit, well I have high personal standards for viewing material, but am also realistic if archival steps are not taking then the home videos will be lost. Keeping DV files on DVD is not an option if you have hundreds of hours of material. With high quality MPEG 2 archiving this material becomse feasible and it makes it displayable to a much wider audience via DVD players. Go on, bite the bullet MPEG2 done right is a viable archive option.

[edDV]

edDV,

I think your analogy is flawed:

Mpeg2 still generates 720*576 (PAL land) lines of resolution as does DV, now a print off a negative is a major loss step - more like DV to VCD. The real question is what artifacts are introduced by reencodeing the DV and then generating difference frames between the DCT compressed I frames.
....

I expect all my home video's from DV to 26 year old VHS will look not to good on a HDTV, but that is a function of the resolution of SDTV not necessarily the MPEG encoding process - if done right, I consider it a fine archival source for display and editing.

For DV, Y resolution isn't the issue. The difference will be in intraframe and temporal compression and how that will affect re-encoding with either software or hardware codecs particularly the hardware deinterlacers in future generations of HDTV. MPeg2 just won't look as good but the choice is yours.

However, if you want MPEG2 quality then it takes time. On my 2.3 GHZ Celeron, I take 4-5 hours to do 1 hour but - hey! - I need to sleep and work and the computer does not!

That is the rub. Mpeg compression is very time consuming. MiniDV tapes (less than $3 each), if stored correctly, make a reliable archive at least until Blu-Ray recorders (1x time transfer) are available for backup. I worry more about my Hi8 tapes that are older and more prone to degrade.

All of this gets much easier each year as CPU speed and HDD capacity improve and High Def media comes online. IMO the VHS problem can be efficently handled with realtime standalone DVD recorders. DVDR media is getting very cheap.

The immediate problem to be solved as I see it is backup transfer of high value analog camcorder tapes (Betacam SP, Hi-8 and S-VHS). Those I am either dubbing to MiniDV or encoding to MPeg2.

[thecoalman]

I really think it depends on your source and the content of the source. For VHS and HI-8 captures it may not make that much of difference but when viewing high quality sources you will see a difference, considering the fact we'll all be watching these videos on giant screen TV's in the future you have to take that into consideration. Take note of the edges of the lights.

DV-AVI from Canon GL2


8000CBR Encoded using MSP which uses the Mainconcept encoder.


https://www.videohelp.com/forum/viewtopic.php?t=257651