seeking Native digital archivist

[phil cash cash]

Hi All,

Soon, I will encounter the same problem of archiving digital video tape
and other digital video media.  All of this is new to me of course but
i am beginning to learn that the demands of lossless video compression
are pretty high both in terms of cost and digital storage space.

At the outset one would need to determine if consumer-grade lossless
compression capabilities are possible.  I imagine that this is possible
but i am not knowledgable along these lines yet.  I have been reading
that some of us in the language documentation field are under the
impression that lossless compression is unattainable and that there may
be no viable non-professional archiving solutions.

Call this the lossless vs lossy digital divide.  Lossless compression
retains all of the information contained in the original whereas lossy
compression loses information (redundant and unrecoverable) from the
original, that is, it is substractive.

MPEG-4, i am learning, is a multimedia compression standard that allows
object recognition in the original but i have yet to figure how it
works.  Lately, in our multimedia class (AILDI, Univerity of Arizona),
we have beem outputing to MPEG-4 with better results than just
exporting to the Quicktime .mov format.

just some thoughts,
Phil Cash Cash
UofA