Best encoding for archiving

(2 posts)

Started 8 years ago by Paladin 50
Latest reply from mrvideo

No tags yet.

Paladin 50
Member

Greetings All,

I am going to be starting a long process of converting my old 8 and Hi-8 tapes. I want to have them on my hard drive, not only for video editing, but just for hi-quality access to the old footage.

There are so many choices as far as encoding, in the forum's experience, which one is the way to go so I only have to do this daunting task one time. I want to eventually edit the footage into some greatest hits comps of friends and stuff. Through reading the threads, Vegas seems to be the way to go for the editing, but which format should be used for the inital transfer?

Mpeg2, Mpeg4, Quicktime, others? Computer power and hard drive space is not an issue. Just want hi-quality, full screen files.

If possible, share not only the encoding of choice, but the software or program used to do the import (everyting is going to be done through firewire).

Thank you all for your wisdom!

Posted 8 years ago #
mrvideo
Member

If drive space isn't an issue, keep them in DV AVI. Any compression solution adds to the challenge of editing later, and although you can convert back to AVI for editing, the results may disappoint you. If you must compress the source material I suggest MPEG-2 or high data rate wmv. With software like Procoder Express, for example, you can convert these files back to AVI. If you have a DV camcorder, recording to tape while doing the AV-DV conversion gives you a digital archive off your hard drive but available anytime for capture. If you're using a stand-alone device for the AV-DV conversion, AVI on the hard drive leaves you with the greatest flexibility for high quality outputs later. The quality of analogue source material, like VHS and Hi8 is already well below DV. Compressing and changing formats just adds to the potential degredation.

David Hurdon

Posted 8 years ago #