1080i, What format to export to?

[romandesign]

I have some home videos and some client work done on my Canon XH-A1 in HDV 1080i. Getting a Blu-Ray burner is not in my budget for a while. I need to decide what format I can store those videos in after editing in Premiere CS3. I can't store all original tapes and they will degrade with time anyway. So, here are my priorities:

1. Fitting a reasonable amount of 1080i HD footage onto regular DVD media (H.264? But what container? Premiere's encoder or ProCoder? .mp4 or Quicktime? What settings?). I only need PC compatibility - going to play that from HTPC onto 1080p projector anyway. So stand-alone players do not concern me.

2. Very good quality, it will essentially become master and should transfer to oher formats in future wothout many artifacts.

I've tried MP4 with H.264 and bitrate of 15 - looks reasonably good, although it's tricky to make some software players to play it. Some people say Premiere's encoder is not very good and I'd get better quality with ProCoder. Is that true? If so, what settings should I use?

I appreciate all feedback.

 

[Shooter]

IMHO - stick with the tapes for original material.

They will outlast their usefulness.

Keep the edited files on HDs and /or burn some of the files to Data DVD Disks

 

[romandesign]

IMHO - stick with the tapes for original material.

They will outlast their usefulness.

Keep the edited files on HDs and /or burn some of the files to Data DVD Disks

I'm talking mostly home videos - baby stuff etc. I don't need to keep all material and all tapes - too expensive and unnecessary. I only need to keep edited movie, and do is at as good quality as possible that still fits onto data DVDs and plays on the PC/projector.

 

[Shooter]

Nothing cheaper than tape archive . Were you going to re-use them !!!!!

anyway ...(and your requests are a bit confusing and conflicting.)

Playing out from a PC means ENCODING to files that are not going to be best for future editing eg wmv, mpeg etc.. and will have compression issues that may or may not be acceptable to you.

Encoding better / best quality = export as .avi /mov and transfer files to DataDVD and you wont get much on each disk but you will be able to edit them in the future.

Comes back to an External HD being the best way to meet your needs.

QTPro is a good encoder/converter for a lot of media types
Ppro is a good encoder for windows media (not QT)

Doubt you need any other stand alone Encoder to do what you are asking.

 

[romandesign]

Thanks, I'll try to make myself clear:

Yes, I'm reusing the tapes, at least for home videos I don't need a pile of useless footage. I won't need to edit them later - there's not much editing in them anyway, just throwing out the bad clips. It's just home videos, nothing more. I don't have the time to invest into editing those. The only concern is when yet another standard will replace bluray/hd so that I'll be able to change formats without much pain, so the visual artifacts should be kept to a reasonable minimum.

Yes, I realize I'm going to be compressing this footage, and that is always a compromise. I'm just looking for a best quality/bitrate combination for 1080i. I'm sure many people have already investiaged this. I've seen whole bluray movies packed into one DVD with great quality, using h264 or something similar... I need to get comparable or better result. If I fit 1 hour to 4.7Gb DVD I'll be conent. as long as the difference is virtually undistinguishable from the HDV original and it plays well with change of the format not going to disappear too soon...

"Best quality" AVI is just too big. H264 seems to be much better, but there are so many settings and it's a bit tweaky to play back... And I'm not sure what is the best option for wrapping it, like CS3 outputs mp4 that's a bit tricky to play, and there is QT h264 and ProCoder outputs MPEG2 H264, so I'm not sure what's best in terms of quality/bitrate/usability...