I need to render videos to store for future p

Shane Jensen wrote on 6/21/2005, 4:53 PM
Please bare with me, I'll try to word this as best as I can.

Here's the deal. I have over 100 video tapes since I got my first camcorder in July of 1995, that's a lot of footage. I have begun the large task of putting them to DVD. At the same time I'm making different edits of each video for other people. The final and main thing I'm getting at here is a short edit of the best footage of each video tape I put to DVD for a later project when I make a DVD set of all these videos. For example, my second video tape is two hours, I made an edit and cut that down to twenty four minutes. What I plan to do is do the same thing with each video and eventually put all these together into a smaller DVD set. Kind of like a highlight video set of all the best stuff from all my ten years of footage.

The main question I have here tonight is storing these edits. I would rather have this twenty four minute video in AVI since it will eventually be re-rendered when I do the final project. However, an AVI of a twenty four minute video would be too big to store along with all the other highlight videos from each of my 100 tapes. To store them all on DVD-ROMs would take up too much space in my cabinets.

I was thinking about rendering it using the default template for MPEG2 at a bitrate of 15,000. I'm thinking that if it's stored that high it should still look pretty good when it's re-rendered down to a bitrate of 4,000 or so later on down the road when I get to this project.

Does anyone have any suggestions or comments about my idea? Thanks.

Comments

vicmilt wrote on 6/21/2005, 5:05 PM
The cheapest way to store them w/o losing any quality at all, would be simply to lay them (the edited versions and/or the original footage) back to a DV tape.

Compressing to an MPEG2 isn't bad, but it is a "lossy" compression system. Therefore, everytime you redigitize or re-edit you will lose a little more. And these losses will compound as you continue to do them.

Actually - assuming you actually end up with 100 -24 minute videos (that's a LOT of editing) - you'd end up with 2,400 minutes or 40 hours of data. Multiply that by 13 Gigs an hour and you end up with 550 Gigs of storage - at $.50/Gig you could have it all instantly accessible with no loss on two or three hard drives, for under $300 bucks - just a thought.
johnmeyer wrote on 6/21/2005, 5:17 PM
This has been discussed quite a few times, so you might want to do a search on these forums, if you're in a hurry, or if you want more complete replies than you'll get in just one thread.

1. You can archive back to DV tape. A DV tape represents, in essence, 13 GBytes of storage. This is relatively cheap (at $3-4 / tape, it is close to the same price per GByte as DVD).

2. You can archive to external hard disks. You will find various deals on hard drives that let you get a lot of storage for very little money. One deal publicized in a thread earlier today on these forums showed you can get 120 GBytes for under $40.

3. You can put DV AVI files onto DVD. This is a lot of work, since you can only get 4.7 GBytes on a DVD, which is about 20 minutes, and you'll end up with a bunch of DVDs. However, it is pretty cheap, since you can get deals on DVDs that get your cost down to about $0.30 per disk.

4. You could certainly render to MPEG and store the MPEG and audio files, or you could even author to a DVD, so you could play them. The advantage to NOT authoring is that Vegas currently is pretty brain dead in dealing with VOB files, so if you later want to edit, the MPEG file would be easier. If you go this route, you might want to encode with PCM audio, since Vegas unfortunately cannot accept AC-3 audio. If you go this route, and you want to maintain the highest possible quality, then you will want to encode at something like 8,000 kbps constant bitrate. However, using PCM audio and 8,000 kbps, you will get only 60 minutes of video on one DVD. This is only 3x better than the original DV AVI. Since encoding MPEG takes a LONG time, you will have to go through your own calculation as to how much computer time it will take to encode all your video to MPEG rather than simply dump the AVI files onto some sort of storage medium. Also, if you later want to edit MPEG files in Vegas, you will lose quality, because Vegas does not provide cuts-only MPEG editing. By contrast, DV AVI files can be cut in Vegas without losing any quality.

If you have $100 lying around in your budget for this, I'd run out and buy three of those 120 GByte drives and put the DV AVI files onto those and be done with it. Three of those drives would give you storage for close to thirty hours of DV AVI. No encoding, no extra work. Just drag the files in Windows Explorer and you're done.
GlennChan wrote on 6/21/2005, 5:30 PM
The rebate is probably only one a household? Certainly something to watch out for when doing rebate deals.
johnmeyer wrote on 6/21/2005, 5:35 PM
The rebate is probably only one a household? Certainly something to watch out for when doing rebate deals

Excellent point. Time to find a friendly neighbor ...
B_JM wrote on 6/21/2005, 6:46 PM
you could store them at 5000 high profile lossless H264 x264 codec (or xvid lossless profile (near lossless) ) if you want them really compressed but look good,

If you compress them as mpeg in vegas, vegas doesnt not put I frames at scene changes, which may be an issue down the road for re-editing ..

But you could use another encoder ..
Shane Jensen wrote on 6/22/2005, 6:29 AM
Well, I've made my decision and I'm rendering my highlight edits to the Default Template MPEG2 at a bitrate of 15,000. I rendered a one minute test clip with the Default Template at 15,000 and then re-rendered that clip as an NTSC DVD MPEG2 at a bitrate of 4,000 and it really good. I really don't see much of a difference between an AVI of the same clip rendered to the NTSC DVD MPEG2 than the MPEG2 of 15,000 rendered down to the NTSC DVD MPEG2 of 4,000. They're still really big, the twenty four minute video was over two gigs, but the quality is really good and still really good re-rendered. I viewed it on my 19' LCD at full screen and paused it to see the noise and artifacts, there wasn't much if any more than there would have been if I had rendered it straight from the AVI. I'm sure there was but none that I could see and I have good eyes. It's really good I must say. Maybe the new MPEG encoder update that came with DVD Architect 3.0a is proving itself.
[r]Evolution wrote on 6/22/2005, 7:52 AM
...and I'm rendering my highlight edits to the Default Template MPEG2 at a bitrate of 15,000.

Do you have enough storage for all that footage?
Will you be buying storage?
What kind?
What price?

I would send them back to miniDV or DVCam tapes. You can place what you want on the Vegas timeline- leaving @ 3-5secs of black between clips and Print to Tape. If you label your tape w/timecodes and notes you'll know EXACTLY where your footage is on the tape.

If you wanted you could mark a starting point on your timeline using Generated Media/Text... say with a 0(zero) so you can sync the timecodes when recapturing. Depending on how much time you're willing to spend on this process you could Normalize all audio, do minor Color Correction... you get the jist; before burning back to tape. This would hopefully save you time later when you finally get to go back and edit.

Just sounds like you're gonna be waisting a lot of HardDrive space with footage just 'parked' there. I personally would need that space for capturing, moving, editing, encoding... etc.

When do you plan on editing this footage?
Shane Jensen wrote on 6/22/2005, 9:04 AM
I don't like going back to DV tapes, they take up a lot of space. I'm storing the media on data DVDs. Blank DVDs are cheap now and I got the cheapest just for data storage and they take up a lot less room than DV tapes in my cabinets and they're cheaper, too.

Yes, I'm also rendering a wav file for the audio so that later on when I do the final edits I can use that for when I prepare the DVD content in DVDA.

I'm also doing color correction and all that stuff before I do these renders. So in the future when I'm ready to put all these clips together all I'll have to do is drop them in and render.

I don't know when I'll get to this project, probably within the next year with the first volume. Like I said, I have over 100 tapes so I'm talking about an achieving job that's going to be years in progress if I ever finish it.
johnmeyer wrote on 6/22/2005, 9:35 AM
I'm rendering my highlight edits to the Default Template MPEG2 at a bitrate of 15,000 ...

Two really bad things about this approach.

First, even though I understand that you are not planning to ever put this MPEG2 onto a DVD, and therefore the unusually high bitrate doesn't matter, most literature I've read says that when you get much above 8,000 kbps, and certainly when you get to 9,000 kpbs, you won't be able to detect much difference from the original.

The second, bigger issue, is using the "Default Template." The good news is that this template uses a "Quality" setting that is much lower than what is used for DVD quality MPEG-2 and therefore is much faster to encode. The bad news is that the quality stinks. Now, I suppose that but using an ultra high bitrate, this will mitigate some of that difference -- perhaps all of it -- but at that bitrate, you are only getting a 2:1 reduction vs. DV AVI. Given all the disadvantages of the MPEG format compared to DV AVI, why spend all this computer time to get only a 50% reduction in size?
Shane Jensen wrote on 6/22/2005, 9:59 AM
It IS eventually going to be put to DVD. Like I stated above, these shorter versions of each of my video tapes will eventually get combined to create highlight volume DVDs of my videos with the best footage from each video tape. I will eventually make a DVD set of volumes. The problem is I'm not going to have these volumes complete until I have all my 100 video tapes digitized which will take years. I'm making these shorter edits at the same time I do my regular video tape archiving since the footage is already in my computer and digitized. I'm not going to store these as AVI because they are too big and would require a lot more stacks of data DVDs which take up space. That's why I'm looking for an alternative to AVI for temporary storage until I do the final project. I need to store it as a format smaller than AVI but better quality than an NTSC DVD MPEG2 since it will be eventually re-rendered to NTSC DVD MPEG2. I know this method is not preferred by many of you, but this is how it has to be. Quality isn't as big an issue because these aren't my main archives, just smaller versions of my main archives. These will probably be the copies I give out to people as well since it will have all the boring stuff cut out. Make more sense?

I didn't realize Default Template was a lower quality than DVD NTSC template. I certainly couldn't see a difference. I guess I'll have to choose another template that's higher than DVD NTSC. How is D-VHS that's in the dropdown menu there? Which template is better than NTSC DVD?

Edited to add:
Remember, these videos are from a source of analog 8mm video tapes. They range from 1995 until 2003 when I got my MiniDV camcorder. I have about eighty 8mm video tapes along with over twenty of my parent's VHS and 8mm videos that range from 1988 to 2000. This is a lot of digitizing to do and I want to minimize how often I play these analog tapes because some of them are quite worn and have some artifacts. Lots of digitizing to do, which is why I'm making several edits for each person I want to give while I have the footage in my computer. This highlight footage is one of them but gets temporarily stored unlike the other edits which get authored to DVD right away.
p@mast3rs wrote on 6/22/2005, 10:15 AM
>That's why I'm looking for an alternative to AVI for temporary storage until I do the final project. I need to store it as a format smaller than AVI but better quality than an NTSC DVD MPEG2 since it will be eventually re-rendered to NTSC DVD MPEG2.>

AVI is nothing more than a container. It provides no compression scheme of any kind. You can use any codec that you wish and store the audio/video into the AVI container.

x264 lossless isnt a bad choice for archiving.
Shane Jensen wrote on 6/22/2005, 10:17 AM
How do I get this x264 lossless? As long as the footage is smaller than it would be if it was stored as DV AVI.
johnmeyer wrote on 6/22/2005, 10:56 AM
If you're eventually going to put the MPEG-2 versions on DVD, why not render as if you were going to do that today? For your purposes, starting with 8mm and VHS analog sources, if you use the DVD Architect Template (or any template, as long as you set the Quality setting to maximum), and then encode at 6,000 kbps VBR (you probably don't need 2-pass at that level) should produce quality that is VERY close to the original, and you will now be getting LOTS of space saving compared to DV AVI.

It sounds like your concern in doing this is that, at that future date when you want to do some more editing on those MPEG-2 files, you will have to uncompress those files to put them back into Vegas, and then re-compress back to MPEG-2 after you have edited, resulting in loss of quality. However, while Vegas today doesn't provide lossless MPEG-2 cuts-only editing, there are products that do (like Womble's product), and given the HUGE amount of video that we all put on DVD, every video editing company will have to provide cuts-only MPEG-2 editing, or they will cease to be competitive. My daughter is downstairs right now, cursing at Vegas, because she wants to take video clips from her last four years of school -- all on DVD -- and produce something for her friends.

The point is, for the price of one of Womble's products (about $100) you can edit MPEG-2 today, without recompression, and even if Vegas doesn't include such a feature, there will be plenty of other low-priced editing programs that do, and you can switch to those in order to finish your project.

B_JM wrote on 6/22/2005, 7:25 PM
http://www.free-codecs.com/x264_Video_Codec_download.htm


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OdieInAz wrote on 6/24/2005, 11:36 AM
Not obvious to me how to get V6b to use teh x264 codec. Hint please?
B_JM wrote on 6/24/2005, 3:16 PM
render to avi and pick custom tab, look for H264 in vid tab ...