jeffery druzba is dreamy

I’m A Dork – Reason 419

So I’m working on two major digital archival projects for my family. First, I’m making high resolution scans of thousands of old family photos, having them identified, compiling notes, sorting them, and will be able to print any family photo I ever want and will be able to supply any family photos on CD or DVD to anyone in the family.

Second, I’m taking many old family videotapes and converting them to digital format for editing and viewing.

The photo part of it, I have all worked out. I’m saving the photos as lossless TIF files at the maximum optical resolution of my higher end scanner. The video side, however, isn’t so friendly. I have no problems with the conversion and manipulation of analog video to digital. I’m aware of all the issues involved. The main goal of the project is to have as perfect a lossless digital copy on hand that I can edit it down to anything I want at any time. I’m using a HuffyUV codec to encode to AVI. The problem is, I have a lot of footage I want in this format and if I want to keep it around, we’re talking about hundreds if not thousands of gigabytes of storage space that I need. That’s TB or terabytes folks! My Apple Performa from ‘94 had a 250 MB hard drive and that was ample. My last computer had a 10 GB drive and I eventually had to install a secondary 80 GB. Now, I’ve got 160 GB internal, a 160 external firewire, and I need a lot, lot, lot more.

So am I overdoing the quality on the video? My goal is not simply to convert video to DVD quality MPEG-2. I want to encode in the highest quality format so that I don’t have to do this crap again – I mean the videotapes aren’t getting better and any conversion I ever have to do in the future shouldn’t have to be from VHS. Anyone have any advice? Am I just way ahead of the storage technology? Anyone hear of any terabyte-sized drives on the near horizon?

• April 21st, 2004
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