Video -- digital archiving

[Troy Rollins]

On Friday, August 23, 2002, at 07:47  AM, Ken Lipscomb wrote:

> The ideal way, one that is working today, is to digitize at D2 quality.
> Have a hybrid automated online tape library combined with an online HDD
> raid jukebox.  Encode in hardware on the front end and decode/transcode
> in software on the backend.  If this is a funded project, the
> methodologies are readily availale.

This is all true, but as far as I saw, the original footage was DV 
quality at best. I heard no mention of BetaSP, D1, or D2 footage in its 
source state.  Since that is the case, there is nothing at all lost by 
storing footage in DV format, and a lot of space gained. DV is in fact 
compressed at 5:1, using  discreet frame constant bit-rate compression. 
It makes it an excellent choice for future editing for video or web use.

There is also a product on the market, I believe the name is CatDV 
(shareware) which will catalog DV tapes, and allow indexing, keywording, 
search and retrieval of footage. This makes it practical to use actual 
DV tape as the storage medium, and then use automated machine control 
for retrieval and digitization of content required for a specific 
project. The purpose here is that DV tape is a fraction of the cost of 
hard disk space as well as maintenance free. Because of the frame 
accurate machine control, DV can be considered a digital archiving 
format.
--
Troy
RPSystems, LTD
www.rpsystems.net