what quality do you keep home videos at?

[rh71]

We always think something is "good enough" quality and then the future comes and we laugh at how we thought what was good is now barely passable. With disk space in mind, what quality do you keep your home videos at? Do you capture at max quality then re-encode down? I find myself re-doing them down to 720p @ 5kbps. I am afraid I'm shooting myself in the foot. Now I'm thinking I should just capture at 720p even with all these 1080p devices, save the trouble of having to re-work them.

 

[rsbennett00]

Ignoring the parental part of your question since I hate children. I record family functions at 1080/60 and don't downcode them for any reason. I'm waiting for a nice 4k camera to make the jump. It sounds like you just need more long term storage space.

 

[lxskllr]

I don't take videos. and am not especially interested in video, but good enough is good enough. If you can see what's going on, that's sufficient for 'memory' purposes.

I'd be more concerned about format. I wouldn't use any that are patent encumbered, or require proprietary software to manipulate.

 

[dave_the_nerd]

Yeah, there are no too-high bitrates, just inadequate numbers of hard drives.

 

[Kushina]

I'm guessing here but 720p vs 1080p depends on your camera's ability to pick up detail. If there is a decent difference I'd keep them at 1080p. The higher the quality the better. Get more hard drives. Their pretty cheap right now.

 

[DesiPower]

Complaining about disk space is a blasphemy. If you do not have a 16TB mirror raid NAS then you are doing it wrong.

On a more serious note, it depends on how much you shoot. For me in a entire year it's probably a hour or two worth of movie maybe taking up a few gig of disk space, my storage drive on PC is 500 GB, I never felt any need to compress. Now uploading is an issue, but some sites will lower the quality or compress them anyways.

 

[rh71]

Yeah, there are no too-high bitrates, just inadequate numbers of hard drives.

I don't know - I'm just having a hard time accepting that a 5 min video of my kids doing something like sports is 600mb... also because I take a decent amount of these. If it were just 1 video for a 1 time thing like a wedding, I'd definitely go as high as possible.

I do have the space and that's not the issue.

 

[Kaido]

We always think something is "good enough" quality and then the future comes and we laugh at how we thought what was good is now barely passable. With disk space in mind, what quality do you keep your home videos at? Do you capture at max quality then re-encode down? I find myself re-doing them down to 720p @ 5kbps. I am afraid I'm shooting myself in the foot. Now I'm thinking I should just capture at 720p even with all these 1080p devices, save the trouble of having to re-work them.

I archive all of my original footage to a separate drive (just create an ISO of the memory card before doing anything else), then use Backblaze ($5/mo for unlimited cloud storage) for automatic offsite backup (along with backing up my regular computer stuff). Super easy & then I can always get the max original quality for future projects. Plus storage is stupid cheap now...$249 for a 6TB USB drive:

http://www.amazon.com/Book-6TB-Hard-...dp/B00KU686HI/

Or heck, $125 for a 4TB USB drive:

http://www.amazon.com/Seagate-Expans...dp/B00BFFQN3M/

If the footage is important to you, invest in a nice local & online storage system. Word of warning: had several friends lose YEARS worth of family photos & videos (including baby photos) because they didn't backup, and also because they didn't backup offsite.

 

[rsbennett00]

For archiving purposes, get a blu-ray burner for $50 and disks are about $1/25gb.

 

[Kaido]

I don't know - I'm just having a hard time accepting that a 5 min video of my kids doing something like sports is 600mb...

I do have the space and that's not the issue.

Yeah...well, you could always re-encode to an H.264 MKV to save some space. Just que it up in Handbrake & let it rip! The encoding technology is really good...one of my buddies had a "MicroMKV", which is where they take a 25-gig Bluray & squeeze it down to one gig (or less)...quality was excellent. So you could do some bulk-processing in a transcoding program for compressed archival storage pretty easily.

 

[NikolaeVarius]

I don't know - I'm just having a hard time accepting that a 5 min video of my kids doing something like sports is 600mb... also because I take a decent amount of these. If it were just 1 video for a 1 time thing like a wedding, I'd definitely go as high as possible.

I do have the space and that's not the issue.

There are plenty of extremely efficient containers out there that will keep 99.9% of the quality at less than 50% of the space.

 

[TwiceOver]

6tb hard drives are getting cheap. Buy 3, raid5.

 

[dave_the_nerd]

I don't know - I'm just having a hard time accepting that a 5 min video of my kids doing something like sports is 600mb... also because I take a decent amount of these. If it were just 1 video for a 1 time thing like a wedding, I'd definitely go as high as possible.

I do have the space and that's not the issue.

That's around a blu-ray level of compression (25 GB for 2 hours). Which is pretty good (the Blu-ray people would have made it smaller if they thought they could get away with it. Image snobs.)

You could compress it more via transcoding if you really wanted to, but if you go too far, (south of ~4GB / hour, I think) you'll start seeing artifacting and stuff.

I think it's probably more of a volume-of-documentation issue. My entire childhood (and probably yours too) was documented with about 10 VHS cassettes (40 hours) and ~40 rolls of film (~1000 photos, most of which were thrown out). That's a tad over 500GB of data if you don't do anything to it. Which really isn't all that much data.

So how much pruning do you do? Or are you chasing the kid around with a camera 18 hours a day and don't want to throw out any of it?

 

[Red Squirrel]

I don't take that many videos but for pictures I shrink them about 75% from raw and keep them that way. For vacations or anything like that I keep the raws too. Disk space is cheap. I have about 20TB of space on my NAS and not even using half of it.

 

[Naer]

Youtube quality

 

[Rakehellion]

Ignoring the parental part of your question since I hate children. I record family functions at 1080/60 and don't downcode them for any reason. I'm waiting for a nice 4k camera to make the jump. It sounds like you just need more long term storage space.

This. Get a tape drive if you're low on storage.

 

[Zstream]

I only see videos being recorded at the request of a parent, often with the dvd/blu-ray video sitting in a closet somewhere collecting dust.