anyone making movies?
 

I take my videos with mini-dv format...what is the best way to store these files on my computer...avi, mpeg, or any other formats?

-rosey

the best way to store them would be in the raw avi format that you capture them with in the begining thru your firewire card and dv capture software.

but these files are huge so be prepared to have many many huge drives and then be prepared to continue adding as your library increases. You could always optimize them down but your quality will go away and I assume you want to save a master copy. You can try burning them to dvd but that is still expensive as well.

I usually capture my raw video, make my movie clips and render them, burn a master edited copy back to dv on a new tape as well as save the original dv tape and only save my optimized and rendered clips on my hardrive. as well as on my server for my members.

Movies just take up too much space, Next year when the blue laser dvd burners become redily available will be the answer, something like 50 or 60 gigs per disc. I wonder how much those blanks will cost???

Peace!
BV

BV answered your question one way. On the other hand, if you're asking which format is best for displaying them, MPEG seems to have become very popular, but QuickTime's quality/file size ratio is hard to beat.

.wmv format is good if you want reasonable quality and small file size. The quality certainly isn't as good as mpeg but the file size is considerably smaller.

We compromise - we download in raw avi - save as mpeg and keep that as the master and when we want to use it for the paysite we run it through Windows Media Encoder to get the .wmv format.

yes i've heard good things about quicktime as well. I currently went with the WMV format using the wm8 codecs. They have 4 stock compressions for the web and I usually encode all my clips using 3 of them so the end users can choose wich speed works best for their connection, and the windows media player is a WIDELY used and usually already installed on most surfers pc.

Mpegs 1 and 2 are also good but usually take more bw for the quality and I have found to get better quality/filesize results with the wmv compared to mpeg. However mpegs are good for sample clips etc for gallery posts tours etc due to their wide versatility and playback capabilities on all pc's and macs.

no need to repeat it all, but yeah I make movies.

I make dirty movies too... really dirty movies.

yah thats a good compromise and have considered doing that as well
but i have found that i achieve better quality when running the raw avi file thru the wm encoder versus a rendered mpeg, even if it is a decent large file size, and secondly if you ever want to do more editing to the clip (ie watermarking, shortening, etc) it will have to be rerendered again and it's better to do this all with the first raw original avi capture.
And thirdly if you plan to output back to a dv tape the original file size is a must to retain the original dv quality.

To bad they dont make 1000 gig drives for a few bucks. Well maybe next month, lol

peace,
BV

Good point - hadn't thought of that - we shoot candid type videos so the lighting isn't always the best and it gets a bit pixelated at times going from mpeg to wmv.

Going from avi to wmv just might cure that.

The best way to store video is off the computer on the original and back-up copy miniDV tape (or other tape drive format - tape servers are great).

To store NL editing material on disc you can use any type of format really. Just sync your cuts with the original DV source tape when rendering the final copy.