Alternate video format other than DV

March 21, 2006 8:08 AM

What is the best alternate video format to archive DV video.

I have about a terabyte (85 hours) of DV footage sitting on my harddrive. I would like to render the footage into a lower footprint (yet high quality) format for storage. My ideal would be if I could use my 300gig external drive for this purpose. I would like to use a format that FCP could later consume and edit with ease too.

posted by cowmix to computers & internet (11 answers total)

That is a monstrous amount of footage to munge.

Your best option here is probably to downconvert to some crappy format that FCP will handle, do your editing, and then replace the clips that make it into the final show with high quality versions from the DV stream.

Kind of like offlining.
posted by unSane at 8:42 AM on March 21, 2006

Since DV is already a loslessly compressed format, anything you'll do to reduce its size further will almost certainly cause the loss of more information, which will degrade its suitability as source material for future editing.

A backup program that will split big files and write directly to DVD blanks would be cheaper than a $300GB drive, even if you make two copies. Of course, it would take a while.
posted by Good Brain at 8:42 AM on March 21, 2006

Can you simply back it up to DV tape?
posted by muckster at 9:04 AM on March 21, 2006

Cowmix. Go buy some drives.

Seriously. The only approved "offline" format that FCP is really good at is PJPEG at 40%, with a 320x240. You could media manage all of your footage into this format. You could still then access it, edit it, and then Recapture (from tape) at DV quality.

But you can't back it up at a lesser quality and expect to keep it's quality/flexibility for FCP.

Formats like h264, mpeg2 etc, are tremendously lossy and lousy for editing.
posted by filmgeek at 9:19 AM on March 21, 2006

(tangent) Anyone know a freeware (or inexpensive) app for Mac OS X that will split large files & archive to DVD blanks?

I know Toast 7 will do this, but is there anything else out there for less $?
posted by omnidrew at 10:25 AM on March 21, 2006

Have you tried making a Quicktime with JPEG (not MJPEG) compression at 90% quality? I found I could get a smaller file with little reduction of quality. I noticed that stock footage companies like Artbeats use this codec with their footage. Also I believe Blackmagic Design's Decklink cards used to save to Quicktime JPEG format.
posted by avgeeks at 10:39 AM on March 21, 2006

What everyone said - DV is the highly compressed yet high-quality format you are looking for. On the other hand, if you are only ever going to make quicktimes for the web, using photo-jpeg per filmgeek's suggestion would work out ok and you would not neccesarily need to online from the sources.

Nevertheless, I think you need to buy a new drive unless you never plan to edit anything else on this system.

Also, just out of curiosity, is this stuff not already an external drive? Or do you have multiple drives full of footage in your tower?

(and to pick a nit, DV is not lossless as compared to uncompressed video, but it is editable in FCP and other DV-native NLE's without any further compression, which is why it is sweet)
posted by mzurer at 10:41 AM on March 21, 2006

Although a terabyte of DV25 footage is an insane amount of data to "convert", you would be surprised that even DV footage can be further compressed, losslessly, and often significantly (sometimes even up to 50%) using standard compression tools like zip or RAR. I do this often to backup smaller projects that otherwise wouldn't fit on a single DVD-R, but do fit after RAR'ing up some of the DV files.

That said, and as has already been said, you really should just buy more drives. DV is the bottom of the barrel when it comes to formats that you can use for broadcast, so it would be a major mistake (and a waste of time) to downconvert your DV footage to a lesser format. Hard drives are so damn cheap now that its more economical for you to buy a terabyte worth of external drives than it is to spend (literally) several days downconverting your DV footage.

If all you want to do is "archive" your footage...well that's what the original DV tapes are for. They're inherently a "backup" format. Assuming you logged and digitized all 85 hours of footage in FCP, since you now have timecode references to all your footage, you can always batch recapture the footage (and/or the sequences they appear in) later when you need to.

If however, you want to keep all this footage available for immediate editing (which is a smart thing to do), then there is no other practical option other than to just buy more external drives.

Do it. They're cheap.
posted by melorama at 11:01 AM on March 21, 2006

omnidrew: There is a freeware app called MacHacha that splits and unsplits files, and has worked great for me.
posted by melorama at 11:04 AM on March 21, 2006

thanks melorama
posted by omnidrew at 11:33 AM on March 21, 2006

Correction, I meant to say that DV is a lossy compressed format, not losslessly.
posted by Good Brain at 2:06 PM on March 21, 2006