Posted by Mike Kujbida on 07/04/07 02:00

Richard Crowley wrote:
> "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?


Good point there Richard.
Sorry leslie :-(
miniDV would make a much better archive media than DVD for the main
reason that tape is better than DVD.

Mike

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