OT: Video -- digital archiving

[Mark Talluto]

On Thursday, August 22, 2002, at 01:12  PM, Sivakatirswami wrote:

> If you had 100's of physical video tapes ranging from old VHS (and some 
> PAL)
> tapes to high quality recordings on DV tape and your goal was to
>
> A) digitally archive these where the assumption is that hard drive space
> (raid array drives) for processing would not be an issue, but that, of
> course, one would eventually have to offload the files to some storage
> media.
> B) be able to view them in Metacard or Revolution for indexing, 
> cataloging
> purposes.
> C) Preserve original quality while still finding some compression scheme
> that worked in B) above.
> D) choose a format that could be later used to take clips for production
> purposes to make new videos, without too much degradation thereby 
> avoiding
> the process of going back to the original physical tapes to pick up 
> clips
> and sequences.
> E) subsequently be able to create both VHS tapes and DVD's of the video 
> for
> viewing by "the common man with a TV and a VCR/DVD player"
>
> Then, how would you answer the following questions:
>
> 1) What devices can read in a VHS tape or a DV stream and record that
> directly to a storage media? Thereby avoiding PC station/CPU time right 
> from
> the start of the archival process. The idea  being to create a
> "hardware-slave" station where we simply pump physical tapes through the
> device for several weeks and end up with stacks of DVD's... Which can be
> loaded onto hard drives as needed for cataloging and production runs.
I use Sony's Media Converter.  It imports both digital and analog 
signals.  Works great with iMovie.  I do not know of a device (though 
there must be one) that does the whole process for you.
>
> 2) What format  would you want to store that video in assuming that you
> wanted to maintain at least MPEG2 DVD quality video through all future
> processes--assuming that inevitably the original tape will deteriorate
> beyond retrievability.
Nothing beats storing it in raw DV format, but if you must have only one 
file for each video, then I suggest Mpeg4.

> 3) Could the above format be then rendered from within 
> Metacard/Revolution.
> I guess this question is simply:  "Can Quicktime play it?"
QT 6 can.

> 4) Can MPEG4 help us?  MPEG 4 looks interesting, but i) does anyone 
> know if
> a high bit rate MPEG4 file *really* preserves 98% of the original raw DV
> stream? ii)   if there are any hardware devices that will read in a VHS 
> tape
> or DV tape and  output directly to a DVD disc in MPEG4 format? There are
> inexpensive machines ($700.00) that will  do this job going VHS to DVD
> (MPEG2) but MPEG4 would should optimize space requirements... Again I 
> don't
> know if there is really that much difference between a hi-res MPEG4
> formatted file compared to a high quality MPEG2 Video.... Perhaps they 
> would
> be about the same and MPEG4's claims to fame in terms of compression 
> only
> relate to lower quality bitRates.
Sorry, I don't know enough about it.  I can tell you that it looks great 
when you see it.
>
> Email me off list if  you think this is a bad thread for this forum... 
> Or,
> not if you think those here would like to also know about this... Then 
> we
> can keep the discussion out front. Or directly me to a better forum for
> these questions if you think there is one...
A lot of people end up using video in their projects, so I think it fits.

If you found a device that does the conversion for you, I would contact 
that company and ask them when they expect a version of that device to 
support Mpeg4.  Since having this to be automated is your goal, I 
probably did not help much.  Anyone looking to do it by hand though will 
like Sony's Media Converter.

>
> Himalayan Academy Publications.
>
> Sivakatirswami
> Editor's Assistant/Production Manager
> katir at hindu.org
> www.HinduismToday.com, www.HimalayanAcademy.com,
> www.Gurudeva.org, www.hindu.org
>



Best regards,
Mark Talluto

http://www.canelasoftware.com