A couple simple questions about archival quality conversion

[eyeSpy]

Hi. I'm a long time reader of VH throughout the ages, but haven't caught up on the latest info. I have a couple of simple problems that I need advice on.

1) I'm retiring my old Digital8 camera. I've ripped all the tapes to hard drive as DV-AVI (single files per tape). Is there a more compressed format for DV-AVI which will not lose anything from the original? I'd even like to maintain scene separations if possible, but would like take up the least amount of disk space without any losing any quality in sound, audio, or other digitally encoded features, so that I can feel comfortable deleting the original DV-AVI source files. Is there anything "better"?

2) My new camera produces AVCHD 1080i m2ts files. Same question applies. Anything better that can maintain everything in the files with a smaller file size and/or a higher level of compatibility?

Ideally, I'd like to be able to stream movies from both cameras from my NAS through my XBox 360 (I think H.264 works with Xbox), but I don't mind keeping separate streaming and archival copies if necessary. I haven't really looked into software for handling the m2ts file conversion, or if there are any hiccups with doing m2ts to H.264 for streaming on Xbox 360. I know there is lots of info about it out there, but a lot of it seems dated.

I was hoping someone could bring me up to speed quickly, or point me to some current threads.

Thanks in advance

[edDV]

Quick answer is no.

With the cost of HDD dropping every month, best to keep original files on at least two drives and copy to new drives about every 5 years.

There are other formats that are easier to watch or distribute* but all are lossy.

Future displays will make use of all the bit rate of the original DV or AVCHD even if you can't see the difference today. Future processing will be optimal when original files are used.


*for this you optimize formats to the playback device of the day. H.264 will look ok but in most cases a deinterlace is necessary.

[eyeSpy]

Wow. Thanks much. That was my intuition. I have internal RAID 10s for ripping and editing, but for streaming and archiving I have an external RAID 1 NAS. I plan on sticking a couple drives in the safety deposit box as well.

It's weird shedding the whole video tape and DVD thing. If you had a media failure with those you lost a couple hours of something, whereas losing a drive or backplane in the wrong situation and you lose everything.

[lordsmurf]

I-Frame only MPEG-2 with 15-25k bitrate may be a good secondary solution, but it won't save too much space over the DV-AVI, not necessarily.

[filmboss80]

This issue of long-term video archiving is a tricky one. Video, in any form, does not have the duration of celluloid movie film. I still have some home movie films of my dad from the 1930s, and yet videotape I shot 15 years ago is going bad. If you store on DV-AVI, AVCHD, or MPEG-2, you realistically risk the encoding format going obsolete in a few years. Hard drives also go bad, and their interfaces change.

Thus, archiving is an ongoing process. Every 3 to 5 years, I do backups of the vital stuff to whatever new format or codec is out there. It takes vigilance to make sure the important footage does not perish. Whatever you do, keep the originals. As long as your Digital8 camcorder works, you should not rid yourself of it. Find a nice storage space for it. You might need to go back to it as a playback device in a few years.