What video format for historical gathering?

[Jim Hoffman]

We are collecting video from our clients of many of the past commercials, videos, movies we have worked on for them to be used for a demo DVD and web posting... future use.

We have to ask for a format universally available and one that doesn't place too much of a time burden on our suppliers. One that maintains reasonable quality.

Uncompressed is not an option. Tape is not an option.

What would you ask for?

 

[Roberto Lequeux]

Rune stones.

Sorry I wouldn't answer that but curious to hear what it might be.

 

[Gavin Greenwalt]

Is playback or archival the goal? Jp2k image sequence is an ISO format so decoding won't be a problem in the future. Also being a wavelet compression technique it gives an excellent size/quality ratio. Down side would be it's very CPU intensive on decode and would require a frame cycler if you want to play it back making it a poor format for web distribution for instance.

 

[Martin Weiss]

Can't you just ask them for the best available they have?

 

[Jim Hoffman]

The idea is we can turn it into whatever we need to. Most likely a DVD or web download. Asking for the best available doesn't work because quality shift is all over the place. Sometime a 2mb file is considered the best available to them.

There are a lot of options I was just wondering what others were asking for.