Posted by Richard Crowley on 07/04/07 01:24

"Argo22" wrote ...
> I work at a local community cable channel, and all of our older
> programming on Umatic SP, has been given to me instead of being thrown
> out, since we have no more use for it, and no space for it. I have
> made it a hobby to archive the shows on to a digital medium, either
> hard drive or DVD. Most of the productions are 30 minutes, dating from
> as late as 2000 to as early as 1980, with varying qualities. Also, a
> portion of shows, were archived on to VHS tape.
>
> Need help/advice as to how to archive them. I can use a set top dvd
> recorder, but leaning more towards digitizing them with my canopus
> break out box, into my imac and using FCP to fix up and archive. I
> don't know if these would be ever used for rebroadcast, but do not
> want to loose anymore quality than i am already loosing from the
> degrading tapes, especially the VHS tapes. I am not concerned how much
> space, either hard drive or DVDs, as long as it is good enough. I have
> thought about encoding it in h.264 in high quality, or encoding as DV,
> and storing the files on dvds or on hard drive.
>
> Any suggestions? This is a very important project to me and i would
> like to do the best job possible.

According to Adam Wilt's hierarchical list of video formats
(http://www.adamwilt.com/DV-FAQ-tech.html) DV is higher
quality ("9") than 3/4 SP ("6.5"). Therefore, dubbing from 3/4
SP to DV will preserve all the quality you can squeze out of
the tapes (and the player).

OTOH, video DVD is significantly lower quality than 3/4 SP
(I estimate between 3.5 and 4.5 on Adam's scale). Therefore,
you would be losing a significant part of what is on your tapes.
But running off a convienence/reference DVD on a standalone
recorder while capturing to DV wouldn't be a bad idea, IMHO.

Perhaps someone would like to take a stab at placing H.264
on Adam's scale for reference?

> My main goal is to re-master these and destroy the master
> tapes once they are preserved.

Not clear why you would want to destroy the tapes unless you
really don't have room for them or something? Is the content
(undisclosed) something that a library or a historical society
might be interested in?

[Back to original message]