Digital master degradation.

[James Carpenter]

Does the quality of a digital master degrade with every copy I make?
I can understand that this would be the case for analogue, but digital?

My client sent me 6 external HDD's with masters on, I need to send them off to another client, but don't want to pay for couriering 6 HDD's when I could just fit all the footage on one.

My client is insistent that:
"Every tranfer affects resolution though - does it not? We will be cutting from these files."

Are they right?

 

[Barry_Green]

If you're copying files, there is no degradation. If you re-render them, or dub them from one compressed format to another, then there is degradation. Example -- if you have six digitized hard disks of AVC-Intra files, and you want to copy all their contents onto one large hard disk, there is zero degradation. But if you had a Digital Betacam tape (a digital master) and you wanted to make a copy of that tape, so you played it on a deck and recorded the contents on another Digital Betacam deck, then yes there would be a (tiny) bit of degradation.

 

[JeganRX]

There is generational loss depending on how the footage is handled too. Take standard DV for example, since it's a very easy codec to handle in NLEs. To my understanding, most editors don't actually re-encode (render) the DV footage if it is not touched beyond straight cuts, this of course being made possible by the intraframe nature of DV. The moment you introduce edits that fundamentally alter the image (color grading, titles, transitions, etc), you must at least re-encode that segment.

As far as your client is concerned... You may want to put this into lay terms, but with the most basic of operations, you presumably aren't actually altering the resolution of the files, and I doubt you're compressing to such an extent that you're really killing that much resolution anyway.

Also to Barry: Call this roundabout, but if you transfer (I dislike using the term digitized for a digital tape format!) digibeta footage to a hard drive, and then export that back out to tape, is this technically considered a data copy, or is it a recompress? I always assumed this was the case for DV (obviously not HDV), and I'm hoping the same would be true of the higher end intra digital tape formats.