Lossy format for archival use - options?

[swiego]

I have a whole lot of footage in huffyuv/lagarith that I'm reluctant (for hopefully obvious reasons) to encode to MPEG2! However, I have gotten into the HD-DVD craze a bit (have a Toshiba laptop with a HD-DVD drive) and notice that 1920x1080 25mbit VC1 is good enough to reproduce FILM GRAIN. It's amazing. This leads me to wonder whether I can recode my lossless stuff into a high-bitrate next-gen codec and get 99% of the quality for x% of the size. Even if I'm encoding at a high bitrate, it's still going to be a lot smaller than huffyuv. This is for archival, so I don't need fast encode/decode performance, just a stable format with extremely high quality.

Is this something I should look at? Anyone using one of these x264/WMV/etc formats for archival use? Where should I go to learn more about my options?

[BJ_M]

i would leave it alone myself ... i see a lot of your stuff is interlaced footage and primary source material .... just back it up on harddrives ...

[edDV]

Give it a year for the encoder specs to settle and maybe move to affordable hardware (e.g. future AIW type cards for HTPC). You can always software encode less important stuff while you wait.

VC-1 (SMPTE 421M) looks like it will be the choice for interlace material and h.264 for progressive movies.

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/VC-1
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/H.264

[swiego]

Thanks all. I've been futzing around with VC1 (a beta encoder is available from Microsoft) Advanced Profile with interlaced support, and it's impressive in a lot of ways. At a decent bit rate (say 10 megabits) I have a tough time telling apart 720x480i from the original huffyuv/lagarith. I just don't trust the stability of the format just yet. As evDV mentioned, h264 seems to have profiles defined for interlaced content, but implementations are few and far between. At least Microsoft has something you can download now...

Can't wait for those TB drives to show up around the end of the year...