OT: Video -- digital archiving

[Scott Rossi]

Recently, "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.

The answer I would offer regarding the above question is this: if you plan
to do any editing of the footage in the future, you would do well to store
the digital video in uncompressed form.  If you compress it, you lose data
as you well know.  Without access to the original uncompressed video, your
editing options may be limited in the future.

One of our clients is a medium size post production house.  We had another
client come to us and ask if it was possible to edit some text out of an
MPEG video.  The verdict was the post production house could do it but not
without visible artifacts in the final resulting MPEG.

If you don't know what your future editing needs will be, the most flexible
option would be to store your video uncompressed.

Regards,

Scott Rossi
Creative Director
Tactile Media, Multimedia & Design
-----
E: scott at tactilemedia.com
W: http://www.tactilemedia.com