Digital Video to Last

Jerome McDonough, the Digital Library Development Team Leader at NYU gave a very informative presentation on video standards and preservation. The bottom line was that though 4:4:4 (truly uncompressed, an Apple codec and MJPEG2000 can provide this) video would be the right thing to capture and archive, unfortunately it is much too expensive to to store. At NYU they’ve stepped back to the compromise of capturing 4:2:2 video instead. He noted that anything other than 4:4:4 capture and storage was, in fact, allowing for lossy compression. This is fine until migration has to happen, at which point artifacts will creep in due to the recompression of images. Note that NYU uses TripWire to create and check up on MD5 checksums (can I use that on Thomas?) and UC Berkeley’s OceanStore project is taking a stab at very large, high performing distributed storage solutions.