Archiving Digital-8 Home Movies... or The Winter of My Discontent

[receptacle]

The short version: Do I have to devote my life to video expertise or can a person achieve worthwhile results without becoming a guru? Help me make some sense of all this... or should I just admit defeat now? (and is making DVDs from my DV home movies as good or better an archive solution as xvid or AVC? I'm not willing to leave them in DV format with 9 GB file sizes.)

The long version: I have a lot of ~ 9 GB DV AVI files sitting on my hd transferred from Sony Digital-8 via Firewire at 720x480 (at Sony's "16/9" AR setting). I started authoring DVDs from these (using TMPEGEnc DVD Author). I became interested in learning more about video manipulation for personal use. I learned a little about xvid/divx and started downloading TV shows. Then I got an HDTV, started downloading HD TV shows and playing them on my PC attached via the VGA cable. At some point I thought it'd be clever to skip the DVD authoring and encode these home videos to xvid instead. After discovering AVC, that seemed even better. After about a month of reading here and elsewhere, and dabbling with SUPER(C), AVIDemux, VirtualDub, and mkvmerge, my head is spinning. I have "successfully" encoded to xvid and to AVC (among others), experimenting with different settings, etc. but the more I learn the more it seems impossible to get a handle on the myriads of settings and tweaks required to get reliable, good results. For example, I struggled quite a while with jagged edges in otherwise high quality xvid and AVC videos, only to learn that it's the interlacing. I knew about interlacing but the HD TV shows I download don't have jagged edges, so I didn't understand why my AVC encoded videos had them (when played on my PC)... and I STILL don't really know how others get rid of that. (I did discover that VLC will get rid of it on-the-fly if I set it to do so.)

So... I haven't the desire or the time to become a video guru, but I had hoped to get a good enough grasp to digitally archive my home videos and recorded TV programs at a good quality. I've learned a lot (re: containers, codecs, bitrates, formats, demuxing, interlacing) but it doesn't seem like my results are near as good as the shows I've downloaded (and I'm not comparing SD to HD). For all I've learned, it seems there are 100 things I have no clue about (i.e. profiles and levels). Should I just stick with "DVD Authoring for Dummies" or am I making things more complicated than they need to be?

[edDV]

I'm confused.

You don't want to invest time to learn or not?

You don't have time but 9GB/tape HDD storage is too expensive? Converting them will take many hours but a 1TB external HDD can be had for under $100.

First if these are valued personal/family/travel tapes, whatever you do you should save those DV originals for future editing and encoding. Any conversion will limit future use with future encoders. If these are hand held camcorder recordings, conversion will be lossy unless saved to similar bit rates. VC-1 and h.264 are not yet ready for low bit rate interlace recording.

That said, low bit rate progressive copies can be made for playback convenience on various devices.

[JohnnyMalaria]

For simplicity and quality, I'd keep the original tapes (as edDV recommended) and convert to MPEG-2 for DVD. You'll need minimal compression to convert a 9GB DV file into a 4GB MPEG-2 file. Burn on to the highest quality blanks you can afford. Avoid all that unnecessary twiddling of knobs and setting of dials to eek out an extra few percent. It's not worth the frustration nor your time. And, for MPEG-2, ignore the deinterlacing. Let the end display device take care of it.

[filmboss80]

With video, there is no permanent, once-and-for-all archiving format. Tapes go bad, and DVD-R lifespans are questionable. But do what JohnnyMalaria advised so that you have a workable backup to your source tapes. Every few years, whenever newer video technologies come out, make new backups.

It's too bad we no longer have a format as durable as movie film. I still have baby movies of my dad from the late 1930s.

[receptacle]

Thanks for the feedback. It helps give me perspective. Maybe I'll look for a good deal on HQ DVDs and try to keep the DV files, or put them on a HDD and then throw in the closet. Either way, it sounds like authoring DVDs from them isn't a total waste of time given the reasonable quality of MPG-2 and the convenience of watching them.

To respond quickly to edDV... I have already taken a lot of time to learn many things. The more I learn, the more it seems a person has to either become a complete expert or stay out of it altogether. I was hoping to gain enough knowledge to reliably manipulate, convert, and/or archive my personal copies of home video, TV, and movies... you could say "power user" (somewhere between ignorant and expert). Some things in life are all-or-nothing. Maybe video is one of those areas.

As to keeping them on tapes, well, tapes go bad, can get eaten by players (or critters), and are very inconvenient for playback. I never said HDD storage was too expensive. HDDs go bad, too. In fact just this week I lost a home video because of a CRC error that rendered the whole video file completely unreadable. So, though HDD space is cheap, it doesn't give me peace of mind. I am not knowledgeable about the lifespan of optical media, but it sure is more convenient for playback and it seems much less vulnerable to failure than tapes and HDD.

I'm grateful for the help.

[edDV]

Thanks for the feedback. It helps give me perspective. Maybe I'll look for a good deal on HQ DVDs and try to keep the DV files, or put them on a HDD and then throw in the closet. Either way, it sounds like authoring DVDs from them isn't a total waste of time given the reasonable quality of MPG-2 and the convenience of watching them.

To respond quickly to edDV... I have already taken a lot of time to learn many things. The more I learn, the more it seems a person has to either become a complete expert or stay out of it altogether. I was hoping to gain enough knowledge to reliably manipulate, convert, and/or archive my personal copies of home video, TV, and movies... you could say "power user" (somewhere between ignorant and expert). Some things in life are all-or-nothing. Maybe video is one of those areas.

As to keeping them on tapes, well, tapes go bad, can get eaten by players (or critters), and are very inconvenient for playback. I never said HDD storage was too expensive. HDDs go bad, too. In fact just this week I lost a home video because of a CRC error that rendered the whole video file completely unreadable. So, though HDD space is cheap, it doesn't give me peace of mind. I am not knowledgeable about the lifespan of optical media, but it sure is more convenient for playback and it seems much less vulnerable to failure than tapes and HDD.

I'm grateful for the help.

FWIW, I try to keep important DV video on DV tape, HDD backup and DVD MPeg2 backup. I'm experimenting with VC-1 and h.264 but as said above they don't do interlace well except at higher bit rates.

For "personal copies of home video, TV, and movies", I only retain unique clips in DV format (e.g. local news stories), the rest is encoded to DVD MPeg2. For recorded TV shows and movies my rule is if I can get it from NetFlix, I don't need to backup my copy. As HDD drives drop in price and go in to >1TB capacities I see that rotating backups will be practical in the future where every important archive can exist on two HDDs.

I'm loading more assets to my HP "Windows Home Server". It gives me the option to auto save specified folders to two connected drives so important files get backup. It also does auto computer backups. This has vastly simplified archive management plus has instant playback of all files from any PC/Mac computer including remote via internet connect or MCE TV players. I just need to feed it TB drives when it gets hungry.
http://www.hp.com/united-states/campaigns/mediasmart-server/

Interesting that this Windows server won MacWorld Best of Show award.