best way to archive

[ushealer]

Will I lose considerable quality if I store video in a watchable, compressed, format? Will compressing and than converting video to editable format decrease quality enough to warrant storing as .avi or is storing video best done on original dv tapes? Thanks!

[redwudz]

DV is compressed (About 5:1) and is a very easy to edit format. Unfortunately, it takes up a lot of space, about 13Gb an hour.

That said, the best way to have no losses is to keep it on the tape. You can also do your editing and return that to a tape. If you can afford the extra tapes that's the best way to preserve quality.

But if you plan to watch the video as a DVD, then you will need to encode it to MPEG-2 format. There is some loss, how much depends on your encoder settings. For a little less quality, there is XVID or DIVX formats, which are more compact than MPEG-2, and if you have a compatible settop player are another option.

[edDV]

Will I lose considerable quality if I store video in a watchable, compressed, format? Will compressing and than converting video to editable format decrease quality enough to warrant storing as .avi or is storing video best done on original dv tapes? Thanks!

What is your source video format and is the content important?

Family camcorder videos would be most important to preserve IMO.