Digital File Formats for Videotape Reformatting

The Federal Agencies Digitization Guidelines Initiative Audio-Visual Working Group has released Digital File Formats for Videotape Reformatting.

Here's an excerpt:

The project to compare video formats for reformatting is being led by the National Archives and Records Administration with significant input from the Library of Congress. The resulting matrixes offer comparisons of the wrappers AVI, MOV (QuickTime), Matroska, MXF, and MPEG-2 (ad hoc file wrapper), and the following encodings: uncompressed (various types), lossless JPEG 2000, ffv1, and MPEG-2 (encoding). The Working Group's starting point is a useful 2011 report by George Blood for the Library of Congress titled Determining Suitable Digital Video Formats for Medium-term Storage. The inclusion of MXF means that the comparison will complement the FADGI Audio-Visual Working Group's active contributions to the finalization of the MXF AS-07 application specification for preservation and archiving, a "pre-version" of which has been adopted by the Library of Congress as their video preservation format. Nevertheless, as the finalization of AS-07 continues, members of the Working Group and others have expressed interest in evaluating alternate digital file formats. These alternate formats may be appropriate to certain classes of content, for use as interim measures, or suitable for organizations in modest technical circumstances.

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Author: Charles W. Bailey, Jr.

Charles W. Bailey, Jr.