Terrabytes of VHS AVI files. Best Format for storage/editing?

[TeaMonster]

The Situation:

I went down that rabbit hole and digitised a dozen or so old VHS and Video8 tapes from the 1980's. I've captured to .AVI format in raw and lagarith format. .
I'm going to keep my raw ripped avi files for posterity.

The thing is that I am going to de-interlace the rips with QTGMC and I am going to then edit the de-interlaced files in Blender or Resolve.

To finish off, I'm going to export from my editor h.264 MP4 files for YouTube/computer viewing.

So at the end of the day I will have:

1. Lagarith interlaced avi file ripped directly from the VHS tape to digital for archival purposes.
2. QTGMC de-interlaced file used for editing.
3.Finished edit in MP4 format for distribution

The Problem:
I need a good, but not lossless file format with enough bitrate that I won't loose a lot of information from edit to final distribution. I'm currently exporting de-interlaced files as lagarith .AVIs and it's getting out of hand. I've filled up 12TB with avi files and I'm starting to look at buying up a load of old data centre drives to store all this and I'm thinking that it doesn't have to be like this.

The Solution???

So, can you suggest a good, smaller video format for editing that I can use that don't have to have my own data centre to store all this?

For information, I have a fast Ryzen computer with a lot of RAM for editing, so I'm assuming that a compressed file format like lossless MP4 won't be a problem to edit, but I'm not sure about that. I've never used a compressed format for editing before. I don't know if you will have problems if you cut the files up in an edior. I'm not going to be using proxys for editing. Up to now I've been using the lagarith .AVI files for editing and I've not had a problem.

Thank you for your time!

[ProWo]

You could try h264 lossless, all keyframes.

# Example: Lossless-ish (visually perfect) with all keyframes
ffmpeg -i input.mp4 -c:v libx264 -qp 0 -g 1 output_lossless_all_keyframes.mp4

# Example: High-Quality Lossless (huge file)
ffmpeg -i input.mp4 -c:v libx264 -crf 0 -g 1 -preset veryslow output_visually_lossless_all_keyframes.mp4

[TeaMonster]

Thank you! Is there a version for 'perceptually lossless'? I noticed that in Blender when I was exporting a video.

[ProWo]

Thank you! Is there a version for 'perceptually lossless'? I noticed that in Blender when I was exporting a video.

You can achieve this by setting crf or qp >0, but the result will no longer be lossless. In addition, there may be problems with the keyframes.

[Alwyn]

12 3hr VHS tapes in LAGS is around 1.5tb. Forget the "RAW" ( by that you mean uncompressed?) files. Not necessary to keep those. Even if you double-rate deinterlace your LAGS files, you'll only have a total of ~5tb.