Re: Archiving codec advice

ProResHQ is 10-bit, while some flavours of DNxHD are 8-bit, I believe even Photo-JPEG is 8-bit.

Whatever you go with, in 10 years it may or may have software available to decode it. So you need to watch the market and as soon as ProResHQ shows signs of going away or is not supported by Apple, you need to decode it to some other format.

in 2006, 100-300 GB drives were the norm, in 2001, 5-30 GB drives were standard.

In about 5 years, hard disks will be 4-5 times as dense as now, at about the same cost. SSDs will cost as much as HDDs today for the same size. It may even be possible to store everything as uncompressed. When that happens, converting ProResHQ to uncompressed has the best chances of 'getting your original back', sort of.

Just like audio, we don't think of storing it compressed any more. Its always uncompressed. Even phones and handheld devices can play uncompressed audio.

In 10 years your handheld device will hold 2-4 TB, and your desktop will probably have 100 TB inside it. Larger 3U rack mount hard disks will be Petabytes, probably. We'll be looking back and laughing at HDV, AVCHD, XDCamEx, DVCPro, AVC-Intra etc. We'll only smile at ProResHQ.

-----------------------------------
Neil Sadwelkar
neilsadwelkar.blogspot.com
twitter: fcpguru
FCP Editor, Edit systems consultant
Mumbai India