Archiving interlaced captures

[fibbingbear]

I have some video that I captured off of my TV using a S-video cable. Right now it's sitting as huffyuv on my desktop, and as you can imagine, it's huge :-D However, I'd like to keep it in "archival" quality so years from now, if I want to edit it or re-encode it, I won't have to worry about artifacts.

I have quite a few questions, and if people have suggestions, I'd be thrilled to hear them:

1.) How should I compress it? Right now it's approximately 500mb per minute, so I can't keep it in this format. I know a lot of people are going to recommend XviD or x264, but if there are other suggestions (or things to keep in mind), let me know.

2.) [Assuming x264], when setting CRF really low, it seems to produce the same file (i.e., CRF2 vs. CRF10 are the same size). Someone pointed out that I was probably hitting some minimum threshold for the quantifiers (I used the standard MeGUI CRF profile). Should I change these quantifiers to be even lower, or are they set to those values for a reason?

3.) Should I deinterlace it, or leave it as is? Likewise, should I do any noise removal, or leave the noise in? On the one hand, leaving it interlaced/with minor noise will keep it as true to the original as possible, and the noise removal could alter some details. On the other hand, it will be larger in file size and the noise isn't really a 'true' part of the video.

4.) Should I do any color correction before saving, or leave it as is? Again, the argument is "should I be true to the original capture [less artifacts in future if I need to edit things]" or "should I be true to how it was meant to be seen"

5.) Same questions for audio :-D Basically, leave it as is (uncompressed stereo wave), use a lossless format (like FLAC), or go with a very high quality lossy compression (like AAC q=1)

Thanks for the help. I've found similar threads in the past on Doom9 (e.g., re-compressing DV), but I don't think they addressed these issues

[Guest]

Buy a cheap USB hard drive and store it on there as is.

[fibbingbear]

Hi Neuron2. I see your point: at ~500mb a minute, it may be worthwhile just to keep it as raw as possible. However, I've just started recording, and I think that in the future I'll be recording more. Even if I get a terabyte hard drive, that will record about 30 hours, and I could see hitting that breaking point in the near future.

[Guest]

When you run out you buy another one.

[Lorax2161]

fibbingbear,

Neuron2 has the best solution, IMO. I have dealt with similar issues. I capture in NTSC DV at almost 13GB per hour. When I see the progress that has been made in encoding over the past few years, I'm glad I still have some hard drives lying around with irreplaceable video on them in it's originally captured format. I'd be kicking myself if I had converted it to a lesser quality format years ago and deleted the originals.

Another thought... If I remove the commercials from a typical one hour program on TV, I can split the DV file into smaller pieces using a file splitter and spread them out over 3 single layer DVDs. Then I create a fourth DVD with 4.3GB worth (33% of the original project size) of repair with Quickpar and put an equal amount of video content pieces and repair pieces on each of the now four DVDs. If one of the four disks should go bad I should be able to restore the content on the destroyed disk with the remaining three good ones. Perhaps something worth looking into for special projects, certainly not your entire 30 hour plus collection. I have done it for American football games, and it requires 8 DVDs... about $2.50 USD. Not unreasonable.

Good luck.

[Comatose]

Haha, keeping it simple, eh? XD
Anyway, just use CRF 2 (or 1) (x264) and set the Min Quantizer in the Advanced tab (meGUI) to the same number.
Even at fast settings it should produce a much smaller file with transparent quality. Just remember to tick Encode interlaced.

And um, I don't think you should do any processing since later there may be better solutions for deinterlacing or whatever else you want to do to it, or you might not be knowledgeable enough and mess up - and later you'll regret not keeping the original because now you have to do with this.

In the future, x264 will probably be inferior, but that doesn't mean the quality is going to be any worse. Any encoder can achieve the same quality as another, the only difference being in the output size... so, as long as you use a low enough quantizer, it should be good.
Or maybe you should even encode it losslessly with slow settings (or even use Lagarith), as they can both compress better than Huffyuv.

[Lorax2161]

@Comatose: I have never tried to convert DV to x264 (with a low CRF) back to mpeg2 for living room viewing, but it might be worth the experiment in the pursuit of greater knowledge. I'm still not giving up my DV, though. :)

[fibbingbear]

@Lorax2161: I have not done such experiments either, but I have done audio re-encoding experiments. At least for today's algorithms, like MP3 and AAC, if you lossy encode it at insane settings (like 320kbps), it took a lot of "generations" before I could notice the difference. I did an experiment where I cycled between MP3 (Lame)-->AAC (Nero)-->OGG-->AAC (FAAC)-->back to MP3 at max out settings (q=1.0 for AAC and OGG, -V0 or 320kbps CBR for Lame, don't remember which), and it took 5 cycles (or 20 encodings/generations) before I could tell the difference from the original in an ABX test.

[Gavino]

I capture in NTSC DV at almost 13GB per hour. When I see the progress that has been made in encoding over the past few years, I'm glad I still have some hard drives lying around with irreplaceable video on them in it's originally captured format. I'd be kicking myself if I had converted it to a lesser quality format years ago and deleted the originals.
Do you keep the original DV tapes as well?

I've heard it said that they are the most reliable long-term storage medium.

[Blue_MiSfit]

This question has been rehashed many times.... but I'll throw in my two cents.

You can't imagine how much things will improve in the future regarding noise reduction, deinterlacing, and compression. I strongly urge you to keep your sources lossless (whatever format you choose). <FLAC + H.264 lossless> MKV sounds like an unbeatable combo to me.

If H.264 lossless is too slow to encode, reduce all settings until it's fast enough. If that's still too slow (or not much smaller than HuffYUV), then keep HuffYUV.

Actually I just realized that your captures are probably YUY2, in which case it's best to keep them as such. You shouldn't to an interlaced YV12 conversion. Okay, maybe you can, but I recall reading somewhere it can really screw chroma up for future processing.

FLAC FTW though, it can reduce audio space by a lot.

Get lots of hard drives :)

~MiSfit

[Adub]

I second the flac idea unless you don't care so much about audio quality. But honestly, neuron2's idea isn't a bad one.

[Lorax2161]

Do you keep the original DV tapes as well?

I've heard it said that they are the most reliable long-term storage medium.

No, I capture straight to my hard drive. I have a pair of internal 500GB drives and a number of USB external ones that I use for storage. Hard drive prices keep falling and I think that's the cheapest solution per GB.

[pandy]

1.) How should I compress it? Right now it's approximately 500mb per minute, so I can't keep it in this format. I know a lot of people are going to recommend XviD or x264, but if there are other suggestions (or things to keep in mind), let me know.


my 2 cents - use mpeg2 - at reasonable bit rates it has subjective very high quality (personally i prefer mpeg2 over h.264).