Video Archiving
Posted on Tue, Jan 17, 2012 @ 09:17 AM
New and old video is good to hold onto considering your investment into creating the content. If your footage can stand the test of time and can return on the investment time after time than you may want to archive your video footage while retaining the original quality. Video archiving is a way to save your files for future editing or proofing without having digital “hiccups” also known as artifacts due to compression. In order to avoid the danger of having artifacts in your video is to avoid compression completely although this can prove to be difficult considering new video camcorders utilize compression technology such as MPEG-4 AVC/H.264. This compression format has great video quality with bandwidth optimizing technology and saves space although you will have to take the chance of trusting that these codecs will be available and work properly in the future with new and improved editing suites, or they may become extinct much like the VHS or U-Matic ¾” VTRs. There is really no way of knowing what the future will hold for digital media production in terms of standards, resolutions, or aspect ratios with this fast paced technology driven era. In order to avoid having encoding errors or artifacts in your video in the future would be to save your files in an uncompressed format. Uncompressed files take up space but they have the best chance of being acceptable in the future. When archiving video footage in an uncompressed format you will need to calculate how much space your video will consume on your hard drive. Below are several simple formulas used to give you an idea of how to determine the space you will need for video archiving.
SDTV Uncompressed
- Uncompressed 8-bit SD video, 720x486, 29.97fps can take up to 70GB per/hr.
- Uncompressed 10-bit SD video, 720x486, 29.97fps can take up to 95GB per/hr.
HDTV Uncompressed 720p
- Uncompressed 8-bit HD video, 1280x720, 59.94field, can take up to 380GB per/hr.
- Uncompressed 10-bit HD video, 1280x720, 59.94field, can take up to 500GB per/hr.
HDTV Uncompressed 1080p
- Uncompressed 8-bit HD video, 1920x1080, 29.97fps, can take up to 420GB per/hr.
- Uncompressed 8-bit HD video, 1920x1080, 24fps, can take up to 340GB per/hr.
- Uncompressed 10-bit HD video, 1920x1080, 29.97fps, can take up to 560GB per/hr.
- Uncompressed 10-bit HD video, 1920x1080, 24fps, can take up to 450GB per/hr.
