Archive edited gaming videos

[Silitus]

Hello,

like many others i record gaming videos as a hobby.

Many things i learned from just looking them up, but there is one thing i don't find much information about. How to archive your projects without loosing too much quality or disk space.

Right now i record my gameplay with OBS and throw it, sometimes with footage from my Canon 650d, into premiere CS 6, editing it and exporting it into lagarith lossless for Handbreak encoding.

All my videos are 1080p 60fps.

 

Now i would like to safe them in high quality in case i want to do a best of in the future, or need to reupload a video.

I'm considering to use a high bitrate/ CRF version of h.264 to keep a small filesize. I already experimented with DNxHD/ DNxHR and the files are deffinetly getting too big to handle.

Does anyone have experience with this kind of archiving and can suggest some settings to start on? Or even another free codec i should consider?

[AkiraDaarkst]

4 hours ago, Silitus said:

Hello,

like many others i record gaming videos as a hobby.

Many things i learned from just looking them up, but there is one thing i don't find much information about. How to archive your projects without loosing too much quality or disk space.

Right now i record my gameplay with OBS and throw it, sometimes with footage from my Canon 650d, into premiere CS 6, editing it and exporting it into lagarith lossless for Handbreak encoding.

All my videos are 1080p 60fps.

 

Now i would like to safe them in high quality in case i want to do a best of in the future, or need to reupload a video.

I'm considering to use a high bitrate/ CRF version of h.264 to keep a small filesize. I already experimented with DNxHD/ DNxHR and the files are deffinetly getting too big to handle.

Does anyone have experience with this kind of archiving and can suggest some settings to start on? Or even another free codec i should consider?

How long do you plan to archive them for?  10 years, 20 years, 50 years, 100 years? If it's short term (like a couple of years), use any codec that's convenient, if it's long term (like decades) think about whether the codec you use will be supported in that far future or will you have to do another conversion sometime in the future.

 

You can use H.264 and retain a good quality while keeping sizes low, if you just need short term archiving or backup.  You are recording gameplay and games come and go.

 

DNx and ProRes codecs are not really compressed as H.264 is so you will need LOTS of storage space if you convert your files to these formats for archiving.

 

 

[.spider.]

2 hours ago, AkiraDaarkst said:

 

DNx and ProRes codecs are not really compressed as H.264 is so you will need LOTS of storage space if you convert your files to these formats for archiving.

 

 

H.264 can be even much less (lossless) compressed than DNxHD or ProRes

 

 

I'd recommend h.264 (don't use predictive lossless coding; badly supported on hardware decoder) and mkv as container.

This should be sufficient for your needs.

 

If you want a real long time archive use an image sequence. It's key to use a widely adopted and well documented file format like BMP or plane TIFF. Don't forget to save documentation of the file format with the images.

 

[Silitus]

Thanks. I think i will go with a high quality h.264 as you suggested. Would be by far the most convinient way to go. I plan to keep the files for maybe 3 years max. Do you have any suggestions for bitrate/ CRF so i can use it as a reference to start on?

[AkiraDaarkst]

2 hours ago, Silitus said:

Thanks. I think i will go with a high quality h.264 as you suggested. Would be by far the most convinient way to go. I plan to keep the files for maybe 3 years max. Do you have any suggestions for bitrate/ CRF so i can use it as a reference to start on?

3 years, just go for a good quality h.264.  1080p60, about 50 Mbps vbr or a bit more should do the trick.

[.spider.]

5 hours ago, AkiraDaarkst said:

3 years, just go for a good quality h.264.  1080p60, about 50 Mbps vbr or a bit more should do the trick.

Variable bitrate is really bad.

 

You should use a crf between 18-22 and maybe preset slow.

 

 

[Silitus]

3 hours ago, .spider. said:

Variable bitrate is really bad.

 

You should use a crf between 18-22 and maybe preset slow.

 

 

I started to test a bit and even though it may be overkill i went with a CRF of 14 for my videos. I would say it is visually lossless and shuld hopefully have enough quality to "survive" another encode if needed for e.g. a best of.