Posted by HerHusband on 02/10/07 19:00

> Depends on what you are shooting. You do realize that
> you are irretrievably throwing away a significant portion
> of the quality of DV by compressing to MPEG.
> OTOH, I have the expectation that television viewing
> screens will get BETTER over time and that downgrading
> my video to MPEG will turn out to be an even more
> regrettable mistake when viewed from 5-10-20 years
> out.

The screens will improve over the next 20 years, but the video you have
already recorded isn't going to change. Assuming you don't lose the video
data, it'll be the same quality in 50 years as it is now. No, it won't look
as good as modern HDTV, but it's old video afterall.

I have 30+ year old video's that were shot on 8mm video cameras. The
quality is terrible by today's standards, but it's still watchable. And the
9000kbps MPEG2 I use to compress the video still retains more quality than
was available in the original 8mm tapes. Better than our old VHS tapes for
that matter.

I agree Mpeg is a bad choice if you are going to "edit" the video in the
future, but in my case it is highly unlikely I'll have any reason to edit
those old home movies in the future. Assuming file formats change in the
future, I can still convert the movies to the new formats as needed (I've
already tried and verified the quality before deciding on the format).

If you are SURE you will never edit the videos, saving them in a high
bitrate Mpeg2 format will save a lot of storage space.

Anthony

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