Compression for long term storage

[indijay]

Hello folks,

I did some video editing, conversions in the past but for the last decade or so, life has taken over and don't have time for it. So I am aware of this stuff but not much in the last few years.

Lately, I have been making a lot of videos of kids activities. Due to everything being 1080p, the video sizes are big. While storage is cheap, I don't want to gather loads of hard drives, make multiple copies just to realize that something failed when I tried to access it. I was thinking of compressing the videos best quality possible and make a couple of local copies and one copy on the web with a dedicated (paid) backup solution.

I have used HandBrake with its presets, never went beyond that as the results were satisfactory, and was also keeping the original file. Now the local copies will be deleted so I need to make sure that the results are best I can get.
Other option I thought, I could upload to YouTube, make it private, download the YouTube compressed video and delete it from YouTube. (Don't want to use it for storage.) I am aware of the fact that VP9 format is not as supported as H.264

What would be your solution, if you were in my shoes?

Thanks in advance.

[teodz1984]

answer depends what you plan to do with the vids in the future..

[jagabo]

Your videos are probably already compressed with a lossy codec. Compressing them more can only lower the quality. Using Youtube to do it for you will be even worse (Youtube is more about encoding speed, not quality). VP9 is generally considered to be about the same as h.265. AV1 is the next "big thing" in compression. And it will probably take over (Youtube is already experimenting with it) as the implementations improve. Because it's open and unencumbered (at least that's the intention) with patents.

http://aomedia.org/

[indijay]

answer depends what you plan to do with the vids in the future..

Just for viewing, no further processing.

@jagabo,
most likely, it is compressed with lossy codec. Here the issue is the file size, for long term storage online.

[johnmeyer]

These days cameras compress to a "delivery codec," and as others have already said, this is compressed a lot to begin with and any further compression will not give you size savings that would justify the considerable reduction in quality that you'll have to accept.

Your best bet is to save it on hard drives, with a backup to "the cloud." You can have a backup to the hard drive by keeping the original SD card from the camera. They take up zero space and should last for a decade or two. I wouldn't trust them for storage beyond that timeframe.

[smrpix]

Another vote here for just making backups. Unless you're using a Red or Arri, you aren't going to save any space and you're just going to waste time.