Best medium to preserve home movies?

I have a bunch of home movies dating between 1990 and 2000. They are in the Video8 or Hi8 format; I still have the original master tapes.

I am curious as to which medium (DVD, digital, etc) would be the best way to preserve them - in as lossless a quality as possible - a medium which will be able to be watched, or easily transcribed to a future medium while retaining the same level of quality - in 50, 60 years?

Basically, what can I do to ensure my home movies are able to viewed by say, my great great grandchildren should they wish to?

 

There's already a lot of inherent compression (or at least loss) in 8mm and Hi8, so I wouldn't worry about that too much. Two things you could do: 1) capture all the original videotapes to digital files, keep them on hard drive, and back up the hard drives every so often; 3) get a paid account on a service like Vimeo, and post all the videos there. Members of your family could conceivably watch the videos on YouTube or Vimeo for damned near forever. The danger of YouTube is that they can yank them at any time without notice; if you have a paid account on Vimeo, they'll keep it up until you stop paying.

The choice of digital file format is a thorny one; even the government can't decide what's best:
Sustainability of Digital Formats: Planning for Library of Congress Collections »

Some other suggestions are here:
Video Formats Explained »

I'd suggest you choose a file format that preserves the original 4x3 aspect ratio and not stretch it out to 16x9 (aka "fattenizing"). One thing I would recommend is that you edit the home movies down to a manageable length. Nobody wants to see 2 hours of dear old Aunt Gladys jabbering away, but if you can get that down to the best 5 or 10 minutes, maybe with some music and a few nice still photographs, it can be a nice remembrance.

 

That's asking a bit much. About the only medium which has that kind of longevity is stone tablets or paper books/scrolls! 60+ years in tech might as well be a millennium - there are no guarantees.

What I would do is transfer the movies to a digital file using the latest codecs, such as H.265, with generous bitrates. Save to a hard disk and have that backed up on another separate disk. I wouldn't rely on cloud services other than to share (hd backed up content) with others in dispersed locations.

But, over time (say every 10 years or so), you should check that the codecs you've chosen are still widely used or if new standards have supplanted them. If the latter, you should start to consider doing another format update to ensure accessibility for the next 10-20 years.

 

Along the same discussion, would 8mm video source tapes transfer for the next 20 years on disc physically via Sam's Club/Costco services or any suggestions for the Best preserved quality?

Some family i know who came across cassettes from 90's nobody has the camera to playback now!

 

The m-disc is a DVD or Blu-Ray compatible disk (for reading/playing) which is claimed to last 1000 years, or like rock. (Unless you break it.)
The company was trying to make this a standard disk burning choice, and the blanks and burners are still available, but the company now is changing to a service where you send them videos or other files and they will return a burned m- disc. Something is going on with them.

MDISC Archive Service »

The burners and blanks are available there or Amazon and Newegg, click the Bundles to see starter burner plus disc packs.
Welcome to Millenniata Inc. - Forever Storage »

More info
M-DISC - Wikipedia, the free encyclopedia »

 

Get them made into digital files and burn them to archival discs and hermetically seal them up. Make multiple copies and give them to different family members. Also upload them to youtube or vimeo. Most people will watch them that way. If they're really curious, they can go to the discs.

Here some cheap ones which with proper storage should last long.

https://www.amazon.com/Verbatim-Ult...1474866050&sr=8-2&keywords=archival+dvd+discs

There will always be someone with the equipment to play them back. It would probably take you an hour here to find someone to play back an Edison talking machine roll you found.

 

Not advising you what to do, but here's what I did.

Used a local service to transfer the Hi8 tapes to DVD. This was generally successful, although some of the tapes had already partially deteriorated with age.

Made two copies of each DVD, one for me and one for my wife (we're getting divorced) and stored the originals off-premises. I then used MakeMKV to create lossless MPEG2 one-file-per-DVD versions in an MKV container. I have copies of the MKV files on my computer, and also on Google Drive.

My daughter, our only child, has absolutely no interest in watching her younger self, but if she ever does I can put the whole collection on a USB stick she can plug into her TV.

Once I retire, I'll edit the movies to remove all the footage where my wife had forgotten to turn the camera off and left it pointed at the ground for several minutes, as well as just tightening things up to make them more watchable.

 

Good chance she'll make a 180 turn on that & treasure them some day.

 

MPEG2 is not lossless. In fact, MPEG2 is now an ancient compression codec, far inferior to H.264 and now H.265 (HEVC). I'd definitely be using H.265 (HEVC) as it offers superior compression efficiency while preserving original picture quality (which wouldn't be great in the first place coming from a taped source).

 

I guess I wasn't clear. Of course MPEG2 is lossy--even AVC and HEVC are lossy. What I meant was that I wanted to preserve the MPEG2 from the DVD in the MKV file.

I can always run the file through Handbrake if I want x264 or x265. Size is not an issue here, so I don't need additional compression. We amateurs run the risk of introducing compression artifacts or unwanted effects when re-encoding, so I wanted to keep the source material without having a bunch of VOB files to deal with.

 

Thanks for sharing suggestions!

 

I'm not convinced the players will last nearly that long. There are videotape formats used in the 1970s that are nearly impossible to play today, and those are less than 40 years old. (I'm thinking of the IVC 9000 format, which was used for mastering by Universal and several other studios from 1977-1982.)

 

OK, this is my lame attempt at humour but I hope someone finds it funny.

Find an old BBC telerecording machine that will do the bright field recording. You will need to adjust it to run at 30fps instead of 25fps.
When you have filmed the video, take that film to be developed. But as well as getting it developed into a reel of film, get each frame printed as a photograph.
Keep the photographs in a filing cabinet together, so that they can be rescanned into a computer (or similar) in the future.
As the film also has an optical soundtrack, you could, in theory, get this printed too.
Also you could arrange to have the audio cut to a form of record, a lacquer but with higher grade materials, I'm not sure what.

Then in the future you will have the tape, what's left of it, the film and a paper backup.
I've seen paper that's over 150 years old, so this is a good way to get it to last.
Movie studios should look into this for some of the oldest movies too, I think.

 

I don't think a little compression really matters much with "home movies." Every film director who wants to create nostalgia goes to great lengths to reproduced the scratches, bad cuts, focus problems, and general imperfections of old Super 8s to create that "home-made" feel. Barely noticeable compression isn't going to ruin footage of your daughter splashing in a pool.