Choosing a suitable file format
Sunday, November 1, 2009 at 12:26PM An important consideration before beginning the project is the choice of a suitable format to which we will convert all our video files. It is difficult to explain why, but this part, however small, will play a huge part in the successful outcome of the project.
The guidelines are that the format should be of a high quality, and still be of a reasonable physical size. All told we are talking about thousands of files containing almost 10,000 hours of video. The format has to be sufficiently widespread to ensure that in ten or twenty years time it will still be in use. New formats are released daily, but one has to consider the enormous investment of both time and money that could easily go to waste. And finally it should be easy to work with but at the same time be protected from unnecessary changes.
A popular format in use by many archives is Motion JPEG 2000, and one could say that today this format is almost exclusively in use by archives, and is already in use by several big institutions. One would naturally believe that this being the case, it should be a suitable choice, however, I personally am not that enthusiastic about it.
My reasons for so feeling are that given that this format is of a high quality and reasonable physical size, it is not widespread or accessible. There is one company that deals with the development of software products that support it, but it is not supported by any of the common editing or conversion programs. If I stop to think about the day we complete the project, that very possibly we would only be able to convert to another format if we purchase a special card from the supporting company, I feel this is both impractical and unsuitable to our requirements. In any case no one could guarantee that this company would not go out of business within a few years, and then we would be left with a quality format but unusable.
Other options that have come up are Quick Time Uncompressed, DV-50, DV-100 but at the moment we are still searching for the ideal format for our purposes.
Reader Comments (1)
I couldn't agree with you more about JPEG 2000! Glad to see I am not the only one who thinks like this!