Archiving DV for broadcast

[sanjay_chak]

Hi all, I am a new member in this forum. I have been reading the past few days on the differences between DV-AVI, WMV9 and Xvid. However, most threads are focussed on saving videos for home viewing. I am interested in preserving my videos for public broadcast.

I am using a miniDV camcorder, and am able to extract 13GB of data through fire-wire. I have about 200 tapes with me to be archived. That's about 2.6TB of data. I will be generating footage of about 50 odd tapes every year. How can I reduce the storage requirement while preserving quality?

WMV9 gives good compression. But will it preserve quality for broadcast, even at 720x576?

My guess is that MPEG4 (DivX, Xvid, whatever) is out of question, right?

I appreciate any light on this problem.

[Chewy]

Unless you are using a hd camcorder, you can keep the extracted avi file size down to
700MB/hr w/o losing quality

I would convert and burn to dvd mpeg2 for archiving tho

dvd's are cheap and relatively stable, hard drives tend to crash and die

tapes degrade

[sanjay_chak]

Thanks, Chewy. The suggestion of DVD vs. HDD is understood. But are you sure that the quality at 700MB/hr. is sufficient for broadcast? I talk to the content generation teams and they shudder on hearing that kind of datarate.

[Chewy]

700MB/hr of video in mpeg 4 is a bitrate of ~1100 Kbps

which would usually convert to 5Mbps in mpeg2 or SD

since the future belongs to HD and h264, of course the equiptment gets rather expensive

700MB/hr is avi size for playtime

but my point is you are extracting in raw avi format, that's a waste of hard drive space

try compressing it more and see where you start to lose quality

[sanjay_chak]

I would like to record the results of my experiment with WMV9. The file sizes for DV-AVI and WMV9 at max quality (VBR 100 as selected by the Windows media encoder wizard for File Archival), is nearly same, in fact the WMV9 file is marginally larger.

I will try with H.264 now. I was trying to find a suitable program, and saw details on Staxrip in one of the forums here. So, I will try that next, and publish the results for everyone.