What is the best archive avi format fior masters

[jkane6]

hello all,

I have 30-40 1 hour avi files on my system, the files are

frame size: 720x480, 29.970fps (33367 microseconds)
length 1800 frames (this is just an example)
decompression internal dv
data rate 28771 kbps (0.02% overhead)
basically dv type II,

the audio is pcm, but that is minor.

this file is 225 mbytes (1 min of video), my 1 hour files are 13 gigs each, these files are too large, and besides, the mpeg-2 output is only 8000 kbps, so i lose most of the 28771, that i originally stored, anyway, vs9 seems to be able to bring in dv, mpeg or microsoft wfm, what i want to do is convert this files to a more (smaller size, these will become my new masters), these seem to be many opinions of what one should do, i understand that the originals are best, but it is impratical to keep them in this format, anyway, unless i am doing hd, all those extra bits don't seem to be doing me much good and it is a pain to keep bring in the tape, and i need to reduce the size of these files, since i will be adding about 60 more hours of video to this system. it would be nice if blue-ray was here, then i could archive each avi to dvd-blue-ray. but since that is not possible yet, i am looking for suggestions on what would be an alternate format for these files, so i can use them over the years, and let them keep a high percentage of the original quality. i heard that converting them to mpeg is a bad idea, because in the editing process, the lossy format, keeps degrading the masters. suggestion or links would be most helpful.

regards

jeff

[daniel]

please do a search in this forum you will find dozens of references to this question.

In short there is no hope of another solution than going to MPEG if you don't use tapes.
With a high video bitrate and PCM audio the lost info is minimal and editing it once later will not make disasters. In this way you can get one hour of maximal quality on a 4.7GB DVD.

[jkane6]

so going the route of an avi file using a compression codec is a waste of time, which is fine by me, so if i just use the parms of a movie dvd mpeg-2, that should be the best format i can get for the time being.

[2Dogs]

so going the route of an avi file using a compression codec is a waste of time, which is fine by me, so if i just use the parms of a movie dvd mpeg-2, that should be the best format i can get for the time being.

Dear jkane6,

I've recently started archiving my avi files to DVD+R. At about 20 cents a disc, it's pretty cheap.

When you look at the price of dual layer media, it doesn't bode well for Blu Ray or HD DVD discs!

[jkane6]

that would be best, except my files are 13 gigs, so question?, does vs9 allow auto spanning of files that are greater than the output disk, then you could just reinsert the dvd+/-r media and restore the avi, without any messy cutting and pasting and end up as one file.

I'll try your method, since i really don't want to mess with my avi files, of course i could add a firewire 400/500 gig drive to my system. but i was trying to avoid doing this.

[2Dogs]

Unfortunately you have to split the files to fit on the DVD.

The simplest way I've found thus far to do this is to use the "share" step and "create video file" specifying the same properties as the clip (i.e DV type 1 or 2 avi) and in the from the "options" button, select a specific duration.

If you had a 13Gb clip, you'd need to find the run time and divide by 3 and use that as your specified duration. that would result in 3 separate files that would each fit on a single DVD.

When put on a timeline in a video project, the files will play seamlessly as if they were the single original file.

There is no discernible loss of video quality either.

The downside, of course, is that, even checking the "smart render" button, splitting the file in this way takes time. On my system, it's somewhere about 50% realtime - i.e. a 60 minute avi file would take about 30 minutes to split into 3 separate files.

During this procedure, my cpu is only chugging away at a few percent, so I suspect the speed is governed by the hard drive speed. I just have regular 7200 rpm, 160Gb EIDE drives with 2Mb cache.

In fact in order to fit my average 1 hour MiniDV footage onto 3 DVD+R discs, I usually have to make specific splits in the video clips in order to fit them onto 3 discs in chronological order. There's not a lot of leeway when your AVI files total up to 13.2Gb.

I usually "format" my MiniDV tapes in advance of using them by recording all the way thru in a quiet room with the lens cap on. This establishes a continuous timecode, which is necessary if you want to make use of the "Split by scene" feature of VS, and also gives easily recognisable black "gaps" between footage on the tape if you've had occasion to playback and rewind etc. When you edit out these black gaps, the total avi footage commonly amounts to not much over 12Gb, which makes fitting it onto 3 DVD's that much less critical.

[DVDDoug]

There are utilities that can split & join files. I haven't tried them, but they should work as fast the hard drive can read & write, and there shouldn't be any data loss. It will take a few minutes to burn each DVD. But, probably less-time than MPEG encoding.

This is an easy thing to do (if you're a programmer) and I'll bet if you serach the Net, you can find a free program that works for you. You can actually join files using the "DOS" copy command. (I don't know if there is a DOS command to split files.)

Except for the first file in the set, these file-sections will have to be re-joined before you edit or play them, because a general-purpose file splitter won't add a "header", etc.

[PeterMilliken]

There are utilities that can split & join files. I haven't tried them, but they should work as fast the hard drive can read & write, and there shouldn't be any data loss.

You could try something like this (the one's I know of are "split" and "join" they are Unix based utilities, you can get them for a Windows box from the Cygwin port). I am not sure whether they would be able to write directly to DVD drives though - you would have to try it. They are after all command line tools running in a shell application rather than a windows application.

My personal recommendation is to use a disk imaging program such as Norton Ghost or Image for Windows (later is shareware, so you can try it out first to see if it suits your needs). They do span large files across multiple discs, the downside is that they archive an entire partition i.e. I don't believe you can select individual files to archive, you have to archive the entire partition - but since I keep several hard drive partitions exclusively for video editing this is not a problem for me.

These programs are not fast either - but you can ask them to use standard disk compression algorithms (which are different from video compression algorithms in that they are NOT "lossy"! ) so you could potentially save on space i.e. a 13Gbyte .avi might go into 2 DVDs - depending on how much the program was able to compress them - you could also ask Zip to compress them first to get an idea of how much they will compress.

Personally I wait until a project is complete and then I archive all of the files (including project files, images etc) that I used in the project. Generally this takes me 3 DVD's for a 1 hour video and probably an 0.5 - 1 hr where the computer is tied up writing the archive. But DVD discs are pretty cheap and so is computer time. Plus I have more confidence that the material will still be readable in 5 - 10 years time (plus I can do disc to disc copies as time progresses - just in case the longevity of DVD discs aren't what people expect ).

Hope this helps,
Peter

[DiscCoasterPro]

Hi all. Take a look here, see if it would help...

http://www.download.com/ALZip/3000-2250 ... ag=lst-3-1

dcp