I am curious not wanting to throw away anything but having a lot of DV I will likely never open or look at again, I have all the DV tapes but as a backup I would like to archive some as well on Harddrives, I do not however want to keep huge AVI files of all this basically useless video. So my question is:

What is the best compressed format to use to have the best quality archive at the smallest full resolution size? I was thinking maybe WMV since that seems smaller than quicktime for the same video? Also this can be great as a video stock archive to have a one or several TB drives over time, where as not that much Full Res uncompressed video fits on a TB anymore. Especially now that I am starting to do only HD video :D

Any advice? Thanks.

Stephen Eastwood
http://www.StephenEastwood.com

I would archive the DV back to tape or to DVD. Some editing applications allow you to copy only the segments of the clip that are used in the video, saving a lot of space.

If you must recompress, I would use MPEG-2 as that has wide support (i.e., good archival prospects). BluRay looks attractive too (as a data format, not necessarily for encoding your videos in).

I will keep the original tapes as raw footage, and likely output any final work to tape just to have as a final version on tape, but I would also like a backup of the footage that is likely useless, so keeping uncompressed files is not needed, but having it as stock footage available is a nice feature since once its back on tape it will be likely to be as if it never existed, on the other hand having a compressed version on a server will allow instant access to an archive, than if needed I can always go back to tape if needed and recapture. I am just curious what is a good compromise between higher compression ration and good quality/detail and thinking about potential future support, meaning nothing that is way too obscure and likely to be discarded soon. Its more the Still Photographer in me liking to have multiple back ups and access to everything if needed, I am sure this will not be long lived but I would prefer to start it early on rather than wait and wish I had done it with a years worth of tapes.

Stephen Eastwood
http://www.StephenEastwood.com