Codecs for archiving at high quality

I work for a media company that has me archiving hundreds of hours of historical video and film for preservation and use in future projects. I also pull from this footage for current projects for release on DVD and web use. Possibly HD releases very soon. Right now I am capturing mostly at DVCPRO 50 quality with most of my materials coming from Beta SP and DigiBeta. I have some DVCPRO HD material that I brought in directly from P2. Anyone doing this kind of work have any suggestions or notes to compare regarding pitfalls or better codecs (i.e. Prores, etc)?

The thing that I worry about is long term compatibility. One place I know of have already moved parts of their archive from 2 inch, to 1 inch, to digibeta, and now to digital deep storage, and you just know that in five to ten years they will have to port the whole lot to something else again.

My guess is all you can do is to dub to the highest quality with the most compatibility that you can reasonable afford right now. Will Pro Res still be around in 10 years time? Will DVCPRO HD? Probably both will be gone, or on the way out. 10 years ago people were still delivering to clients on VHS, and that seems a VERY long time ago now.

The only safe way to archive is to mimic film archival.
Put the frames as an image sequence into a folder, the sound in a folder and render out a PhotoJPEG compressed quicktime for reference. There is too much vested interest in JPEG formats that it's safe to assume it'll be around for at least 20 more years. This way you're mostly independent of codecs coming and going, just make sure to include a plaintext job ticket with all the information in it such as: timecode start, FPS, interlaced or normal frames ...

Then offsite a copy of it to something like Iron Mountain.

The other thing that some people do is time capsule the whole thing. When upgrading to a new system, don't sell the old but put that in the archives too with just enough software and codecs installed to play it back and export.

sucks one way or another. I don't have THE killer idea either.

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