Archiving codec advice

Hi!

We've just bought an Editshare and will begin digitising over 2000 hrs of footage.(Betacam,DV,HDV,HDCAM)

We had almost decided Prores 422 as the codec to go with but after the Final Cut X reaction, a little uncertain about the future of Apple Prores.

We're looking for a codec which will be cross platform and stand the test of time.

I keep reading DnXHD and Photo Jpeg are good options.

Any Ideas? Whats everyone on the forums using?

Thanks

Gautam Pandey
http://www.riverbankstudios.com

[Gautam Pandey] "We're looking for a codec which will be cross platform and stand the test of time."

It doesn't exist, that's probably why you haven't had any responses here. Both ProRes and DNxHD are fine for the near term. There's no telling if either codec will be in use ten years from now. Some people are using h.264 (at higher data rates) for archiving. Will h.264 still be used ten years down the road? Who knows? Improved algoritms allow for more efficeint high qulity codecs. Better is always around the corner. It's a moving target.

Just make a decision that will best fit your needs. I know of one large enterprise level facility that decided to use ProRes as their codec for archiving. I know another (Avid based facility) that archives everything in DNxHD. And a third facility (a network) that is storing everything in XDCAM HD. Each of these choices was the right choice for that particular facility.

Whatever you choose to use just be mindful that you may need to rewrap or transcode the files at some point in the future. By then we will have supercomptuers that will transcode your 2000 hours of footage in less than 10 minutes. Piece of cake.

If I had the need to archive 2000 hours of footage and I had multiple FCP suites available for ingest - I would probably choose ProRes 422 HQ.

Just an opinion.

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.

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

This was a pretty helpful thread. What did you end up using ultimately?