Good Bitrates & format(s) for ARCHIVING Canon HDSLR footage?

salils

salils

Well-known member
I have a bunch of HDSLR footage that isn't destined for visual effects or heavy grading, but I want to save (mostly "raw" footage from productions or home video/non production stuff). If it was DV, I'd probably back it up to a tape but those days are over...

Footage specs:

Cameras of origin: Canon 5D Mark II, Canon 7D
Approx bitrate: 47-50 mega-bits/second; H.264 codec
Frame rates/Resolutions: 1280x720/60p, 1920x1080/24p, 1920x1080/30p

I have access to an 8 core i7 w/8gb ram for encoding and a few other Windows machines, so processor intensive encoding is welcome.

I have a wide range of footage, I don't intend to optimize the bitrates for ever clip, there is too much footage for that. So I was wondering what software and bitrates/settings others are using to bring the file size down with minimal visible loss in quality.

Suggestions are appreciated! Thanks for reading!
 
The best method is to archive the entire file structure of each card. That preserves it in the same state as it came out of the camera. Think of this as your "negative".
 
arniepix said:
The best method is to archive the entire file structure of each card. That preserves it in the same state as it came out of the camera. Think of this as your "negative".
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Right, but the objective here is to significantly reduce the space taken up. It's almost inevitable that some files which are useless will be deleted.
 
salils said:
Right, but the objective here is to significantly reduce the space taken up. It's almost inevitable that some files which are useless will be deleted.
Click to expand...

I would just buy more hard drive space than waste time transcoding it into even smaller file sizes!

About the closet you could probably get would be AVCHD, which would be half the bitrate.
 
Gary Huff said:
I would just buy more hard drive space than waste time transcoding it into even smaller file sizes!

About the closet you could probably get would be AVCHD, which would be half the bitrate.
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Okay, you're welcome to buy me 4 x 2tb drives
 
Gary Huff said:
Perhaps you're not charging enough if you can't support the infrastructure for your clients?
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In this case, unfortunately, there's not really any clients associated with the footage. This isn't footage from jobs in other words.
 
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