digital video

[David Nash]

To supplement general advice about digital video, such as at
http://emeld.org/school/classroom/video/
I would like to share a recent find, of an excellent free application
MPEG Streamclip 1.3.1
http://www.alfanet.it/squared5/mpegstreamclip.html
(I found it via the panoply linked from
http://www.pure-mac.com/video.html )

To handle MPEG-2, MPEG Streamclip requires the MPEG-2 plugin for
QuickTime which needs to be purchased from Apple
http://www.apple.com/quicktime/mpeg2/
Without the plugin, MPEG Streamclip can still work with other formats.

AIATSIS Audiovisual Archive have published standards and advice for
digital audio and images
http://www.aiatsis.gov.au/ava/Digital/digiarch1.htm, but not yet for
video.  AIATSIS Audiovisual Archive does have the equipment to play
and digitise analogue video from just about any of the dozens of
analogue video formats.  At this stage their recommendation for a high
quality access format is MPEG-2 (and they can also provide QuickTime
to various specifications, and possibly other formats).

As a note on the state of digital video for archiving, the National
Archives of Australia in their current newsletter (_Memento_ 29,
Autumn-Winter 2005, p.3, available at
http://www.naa.gov.au/Publications/memento/ ) describe how they have
preserved a film series (Seven Little Australians): "As we had the
original negatives, we were able to use them to make new, high-quality
film components. This was an expensive exercise, but in the constantly
shifting world of digital imaging standards, it is the only solid
preservation backstop."
However, for material originally recorded as analogue video (and
certainly as digital video), transfer to film can't be the way to go!

David Nash

--
http://www.anu.edu.au/linguistics/nash/