Best format for storage

[trikcard]

Well, I'm finally taking all my MiniDV tapes and capturing them, authoring them, and burning them onto DVD. Now, half way through my collection, I'm running into a problem. Not enough storage space. I've got a total of a little over 1 TB of storage, but it got eaten up so fast. I'm still retaining my original AVIs which as you know take up massive space. I'm not sure when or if I will need them again. So I want to keep them. I was mainly wondering which format would be a bit better storage format than straight AVI. If I could put one per DVD that would be fine. The main things I want to consider is.

1. Size -- If I could get an hour or so under the 4.7 Gigs that would be great.

2. Ability to reauthor - I want to be able to immediately reauthor it again in Premiere rather than having to re-encode it again. As that would lead to even more quality loss.

3. Quality -- Of course I want good quality. I understand it won't be lossless, but I was wondering which would be best.


Initially I thought of Divx or Xvid, but both of these have substantial quality loss. And I've never tried to import them into Premiere so don't know if it would work. There are some work videos, but mainly home movies.

What do you guys use to store digital video?

[edDV]

a. Keep material on tape as full quality backup.

b. Also keep important material in DV format for future editing. Hard disks are cheap.

c. Second class material can be backup encoded to MPeg2 (6-8Mb/s) or even MPeg4 H.264 (3-5Mb/s)

[thecoalman]

In addition to keeping the tapes as suggested by EdDV I'd also suggest keeping additional backups on disc as well, what I do is transfer the tapes to a drive. The tapes get sent to another location, could be a relatives house, neighbor, safe deposit box etc. In any case you'll have two copies both of which should be very viable for a long time. The chances of failure for both is minimal.

If you must reduce the size use MPEG2 @8000kbps or higher .