Archives, Pro Rezz and my confusion

S

Sirocco

Active member
I volonter for a non profit organisation. We have visual archives dating from the 1930's up to now. There is stuff in every formats (film, Umatic, betacam, vhs, dvd , dvcpro, etc) also there is stuff coming from differents counytries and standards(pal, Ntsc, etc).
Some of it has been digitize as Quicktime file and it takes a lot of room. We estimates if everything was to be digitize it may be around 4 tetra.
My question is: this new codec (pro rezz) could it be a solution for us?
Is it possible to transfer a 10 gig Quicktime file into a 1.7gig of Pro Rezz without loosing any quality? Or should we choose H.264. We intend to publish on the web and on DVD some of our archives.
Thanks for your help.
 
H.264 definitely not- if you intend to do any editing. DV is probably more than up to the task for NTSC/PAL and gives you the best trade off between storage space and quality. If you go with ProRes you'll get potentially higher image quality, depending on the image quality but probably not worth it for the extra space you'd need.

-Noah
 
From what I have been told Pro rez is a higher bandwidth format than DV but slightly less than or equal to bandwidth of SD 1:1 It seems to be approximately the same size as Avid's DNX 145 FYI
 
Pro Res won't be something you can use until FCS2 actually ships which is at least a month or so away. It is not necessarily a suitable web format definitely not for DVD. But as an archival format I could see it being at least as useful as DV. The only way to decide for sure is to run some tests. Also you'll want to have a Kona or Black Magic card to connect all of those different types of decks to FCP for the actual capturing.

Noah
 
ProRES is a High Definition codec. It delivers HD resolution at Standard Def compression. If you are working with Standard Def, then ProRes isn't a solution for you. DV/NTSC and DV50 are good options.
 
What problem are you trying to solve? Talking about archiving your audio visual heritage in the same sentence with distributing it over the web is antithetical.

Obviously uncompressed is the best format for archiving, however as you've stated it produces huge amounts of data. Because you have such a variation in media you need to develop a digital intermediate that enables you to capture at the highest resolution practicable but flexible enough to efficiently create any distribution format required. ProRes is not a good codec for several reasons, as Shane pointed it out it is an HD codec, but in reality its probably a wavelet codec and is resolution agnostic, a bigger reason to not use it for your application is that it is FCP only. You will probably need to use a lot of different tools, Revival restoration software for example.

There are two intermediate codecs you should check out, Sheer Video and Cineform. Cineform is similar to the ProRes codec, it is a lossy codec that is CPU intensive for encoding but can probably compress about 6 to 1 or even 8 to 1 without an objectionable loss in image quality. Sheer Video is a lossless codec, so the number of times it is trans coded is irrelevant but you'll only get about a 3 or 4 to 1 compression. Both of these codecs are true intermediate codecs and can be used in a variety of applications and platforms.
 
Shane Ross said:
ProRES is a High Definition codec. It delivers HD resolution at Standard Def compression. If you are working with Standard Def, then ProRes isn't a solution for you. DV/NTSC and DV50 are good options.
Click to expand...

ProRes is both an SD and HD codec. Its a 422 codec which can be setup in either HQ (220 mb/sec) or standard (145 mb/sec) variable bit rate compression at any frame rate / size. Having said that, it does seem more suited to HD workflow's.

Here is what you will see inside FCP 6.0 Media Manager:
1177200914.jpg

Taken from the ProRes overview movie on apple.com.

--Mark
 
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