@Colin-Anderton I'm not @3POINT, but DO NOT RENDER THESE FILES TO M-DISC OR ANY OTHER OPTICAL MEDIA.

Buy two portable USB connected hard drives. Put a copy of your finished work on each of the hard drives and store them in different physical locations.

Yes, you should render to square pixels as analog video is not going to make a comeback any time soon. Your goal should be to make the payload (actual picture minus the noise and "overscan") look natural on a modern TV.

3POINT - The ultimate aim is to render these files to M-Discs, either as MPEG-2 or MP4. Should I use square pixels? I hope I can, as the whole thing seems simpler that way.

MP4 usually uses square pixels and is progressive. When aim is also Youtube etc, than also better go for progressive MP4. Forget about MPEG-2. Also forget about discs...

John was a second faster but has the same opinion as I have.

@Colin-Anderton h.264, x.264 (AVC) in an MP4 wrapper should be widely playable (at least for our lifetime).

Here is an example of a tape transfer of a 1988 VHS that I did in Vegas. The plastic look was the tape recorder itself.

I suspect the people who really worry about how much overscan to include in the final output have never adjusted the vertical height and horizontal width after replacing a picture tube on an analog TV.

I have.

@3POINT I'm rarely a second faster than anyone left on the planet.

Here is what youtube returned to me from the previous video.

It appears that I resized this video to 800x600 (a square pixels 4:3 aspect ratio of 1.333333333) to include in a 1280x720 square pixels render.

Since the final vertical dimension is 592 pixels, I'll assume that I cropped away some crap that offended my eyes.

This is a forensic analysis of something that I did years ago, probably as a thought experiment. Only my wife expects me to remember the details of everything I did in 1973.

@Dexcon said: "...the closest that I could find in MediaInfo to the Pixel AR item in Catalyst Browse is the "Bits(Pixel*Frame):" item under MediaInfo's Text or Tree view which - to me - is not all that helpful."

The Bits(Pixel*Frame) parameter is a measure of compression, how many bits are used to encode a screen with horizontal and vertical pixel dimension times at a given frame rate. It makes no explicit statement about the aspect ratio.

Reference: What is Data Rate and Bits Per Pixel - Streaming Learning Center

what about the noise at the bottom of the image, when the original is from video tape?

@Colin-Anderton As Dexcon said you can crop it out. But cropping can reduce image quality, albeit slightly, so what I'd do is cover it up. On your timeline top track place a thin black strip along the bottom of the image to hide the noise. You can use Media Generator Solid Color Black suitably placed for this. On your final render you end up with a thin black letterbox along the bottom but playing on your TV you probably won't notice it. It certainly will be less obtrusive than the original VHS noise.

john_dennis - why are you so opposed to optical media? You sound as if you have a good reason, so I'm all ears....

How long do you think that there will be hardwareplayers avaliable for your discs? Ask your grandkids how they watch videos?

@3POINT I can still play my vinyl records? heh, heh. I prefer physical media myself when possible. Just the old school in me.

@DMT3 I'm lucky that I sold my complete Vinyl archive before nobody old school is left over. I only kept the complete Bob Marley Vinyl collection as souvenir, I don't have a recordplayer anymore.

john_dennis - why are you so opposed to optical media? You sound as if you have a good reason, so I'm all ears....

How long do you think that there will be hardwareplayers avaliable for your discs? Ask your grandkids how they watch videos?

They can still watch things that were originally on video tape, though, can't they? It's just that they've been transferred to digital media.

People keep predicting the demise of discs, but they're still here. Most of the discs I regularly watch, I created over ten years ago - and I've never had a single issue with them. It's all about how they are stored.

But anyway, I have a feeling that discs are going to be around a long, long time. Personally, I feel that a recording is only really safe when it's on a disc - especially an M-Disc. As long as you're careful in handling it, it will last and last.

Like DMT3, I prefer to have physical media as a safe backup, while using HDs for quick access.

@Colin-Anderton asked: "...why are you so opposed to optical media? You sound as if you have a good reason, so I'm all ears...."

In my work life, I worked in hundreds of data centers and witnessed businesses struggle with growing data volume over the decades. At various times, optical libraries were thought to be the low-cost solution for archive data that couldn't be deleted but was unlikely to be accessed in the future. When I retired, there was not a single optical media library on the raised floor and only two tape libraries.

I've used every type of optical media at home. I once had two Zip Discs (a parallel port version for when I traveled and a SCSI version for my home computer). One of my zip discs failed when I was working to a deadline causing me to miss my deadline.

I burned my first $12.00 CD blank doing a record transfer for a colleague. He had a choral concert from his high school days on a vinyl record.

I used to use CD-R media as temporary storage when one could keep the disk open and keep writing to it until it was full. (It actually just wrote the new file to a new location on the disk until it ran out of space).

The theme of this is that I used removable media as a hard drive replacement when hard drives were expensive. These day hard drives are relatively inexpensive.

I still have all of my own vinyl records. The only ones I've transferred to digital are the ones that I was unable to replace with CD or high-resolution downloads. This is primarily for mobility. My car plays music from USB flash drives. I have a high-resolution music player for walking, though I usually listen to the radio on a $20 burner phone.

Warranty Information

All of my advice comes with a double-your-money-back guaranty.

john_dennis - I don't quite get the point you're making, John. The cost of storage is not a factor for me. With precious recordings, price is very much a secondary consideration.

With what I've read about M-Discs, this is a way to preserve video permanently - isn't it?

Perhaps, as long as the read hardware is available and supported by whatever operating system is available when we're all dead. I won't try to dissuade you anymore.

Perhaps, as long as the read hardware is available and supported by whatever operating system is available when we're all dead. I won't try to dissuade you anymore.

 

I do appreciate your advice, John - very much. You may turn out to be correct; I just like to have something on disc as a master recording, and copies on HD that I can get at quickly when I want to use clips in documentaries etc.

But anyway, thank you John, and all the others here who have helped with advice. You're a great bunch of people, and I shall certainly turn to this forum whenever I need any help, or if I can offer advice to others. I feel among friends here.