Transcoding ProRes to H.265 for archival purposes...
 

Hi all. I posted this over at DVXuser but it's not really getting a lot of traction over there, so I thought I'd try here. Not really sure this is the right section to post this in, but here it goes.

So I'm trying to free up space on my HDDs, ("space is cheap, just buy another one, blah, blah, blah"), and I had this wild hair to transcode my old ProRes files (they're mostly 4K 4:2:2 10 bit clips from a GH4 recording to a Ninja Flame) to h.265, simply because I don't think I'll ever use this footage ever again. So I did a test over the weekend where I transcoded the ProRes files from an entire project into HEVC, made a copy of the original project file, and then relinked the ProRes files to the new h.265 files. I did a test render and then compared the ProRes to the h.265, and they're visually the same. The original file sizes from the ProRes project was ~160GB, and the h.265 is less than 10GB. Space saved.

SO.

Is this a good idea to pursue? I am really only doing this to projects that have been wrapped up for a while and that I don't think I'll touch ever again. I just don't know about the archival qualities of the HEVC codec, as it's still pretty new.

Anyone have any thoughts on this?

SB

Re: Transcoding ProRes to H.265 for archival purposes...
 

I go one step further. Once a few months have gone by and the customer is satisfied I archive the project only keeping the final standard def movie delivered and a hd movie for the future. All the original video gets deleted. This yields around 10gb per project allowing me to archive many years on a single hard drive.

In all my time I've only had a couple of times where I needed to go back and it was only to make an additional copy of the dvd produced or pull a few clips together for a compilation for a studio anniversary. Never needed the original footage.

I'm looking to buy two 4tb drives so I can fit all my archives on one drive and mirror. If you don't reduce the size of your projects then your one hard drive failure away from losing everything. Hard drives commonly fail after 6 years.

Re: Transcoding ProRes to H.265 for archival purposes...
 

I just prefer the more... careful method of keeping the footage. H.265 is working great so far on the space saving front.

SB

Re: Transcoding ProRes to H.265 for archival purposes...
 

Are you saving it as 10-bit 422 H.265 or 8-bit 420 H.265?

Re: Transcoding ProRes to H.265 for archival purposes...
 

I'm pretty sure (I can't find where to change the bit depth in Media Encoder) that it's going down to 8-bit.

SB

Re: Transcoding ProRes to H.265 for archival purposes...
 

I would also assume 4:2:0 unless you have a setting for that.