Archive format for DV tapes?

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Archive format for DV tapes?
by Ze'ev Gilad on May 25, 2012 at 12:27:46 am

I'm capturing a bunch of old DV-NTSC tapes for safekeeping. These are home movies; not professional stuff. (Most of it was shot on a HandyCam DCR-PC100.)

But the native DV format takes up heaps of space.

I was wondering if there's a "modern" codec alternative, which will maintain, say, 90% of the original quality, but save me a bunch of space. Maybe even de-interlace while I'm at it...

As I recall, DV is 25mbps, but my gut tells me that H.264 could give me nearly the same quality at 4-5mbps.

Any thoughts?

thanks

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Re: Archive format for DV tapes?
by Peter Burger on May 25, 2012 at 10:05:52 am

I'd also say that H.264 is the way to go for archiving in a compressed format.
Don't think you can spot any differences to the original by eye at 4-5 mbps with H.264.

Maybe use 2-pass encoding to get best quality at smallest file-sizes. Takes bit longer though.
Great thing is: If you have - say - clips with fast motion or more complex content (trees with leaves etc.) you can set the maximum bitrate higher and the encoder will increase bitrate to the needed maximum bitrate in that parts.

Depending on your clips and encoder you can reduce file size even further by audio compression (using lower bitrates and/or mono instead uf stereo).

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Re: Archive format for DV tapes?
by Jeff Pulera on May 30, 2012 at 1:55:58 pm

I think people these days are getting too used to compression of MP3 audio and online video clips. I would argue that DV files are NOT huge at all, in the scheme of things. Apparently you have never worked with professional video formats, compressed or uncompressed, which make DV compression look downright thrifty.

You didn't say you want to put the collection in a Cloud somewhere, but rather to archive it for "safekeeping". Considering that a cheap 1TB drive will hold 70+ hours of DV footage, and that 2TB and 3TB drives are also very inexpensive, I don't see storage being an issue.

Please note that "deinterlacing" is going to THROW AWAY HALF THE PICTURE. I don't consider that to be "archiving" or "safekeeping" myself.

Now, if your intention is to carry the archive with you on a thumb drive on your keychain, I can understand the compression angle, otherwise, no.

Quality is always lost when adding compression and I don't consider that "archive quality". It is like a photocopy, not as good as the original.

Just my opinion

Jeff

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Re: Archive format for DV tapes?
by Craig Alan on Jun 2, 2012 at 4:45:26 am

make dupes of the tapes. reserves full quality and if stored properly will last much longer than any hard drive. i would not compress them. the nice thing about the old mini-dv, is that you did not need to compress the image any further. you could shoot edit and output in dv. as an alternative you could buy a hard drive dock http://eshop.macsales.com/item/NewerTech/FWU3ES2HDKU/ and buy hard drives on sale. You can find 2TB drives for like $120. Figure about 13 gigs per hour.

you could also capture each tape, edit out the junk. add a title with details of what was shot and when, export back to tape. no quality loss and will preserve what you have in more viewable form.

MacPro4,1 2.66GHz 8 core 12gigs of ram. GPU: Nvidia Geoforce GT120 with Vram 512. OS X 10.6.x; Camcorders: Panasonic AG-HPX170, Sony Z7U, Canon HV30/40, Sony vx2000/PD170; FCP 6 certified; write professionally for a variety of media; teach video production in L.A.

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