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The challenges of converting to digital video: recent advancements have allowed this technology to be more accessible. (The Systems Librarian).

Article Excerpt
If a picture is worth a thousand words, full-motion video fills volumes. Digital video, while an exciting medium, presents a number of storage, preservation, and access challenges. If it can be harnessed, however, it can deliver content in ways that far exceed the capabilities of text, sound, or still images alone.

Digital video has been a big part of my work in recent months. I've been developing a strategy for converting the library's large analog videotape collection into digital form. It's been a major learning experience that has required me to gain hands-on knowledge of various digital video applications as well as become familiar with the related standards, file formats, and compression schemes. In this column I'll pass on some of the basics that I've learned.

Storage Issues, Options

One of the challenges of digital video that becomes apparent very quickly is the vast amount of storage it demands. From text to still images, sound, and full-motion video, multimedia options form a continuum of increasing needs for storage and bandwidth. Video, by far, is the medium with the largest storage appetite. In its simplest form, digital video consists of a series of bitmapped images that are strung together in rapid succession. Without compression, an hour of raw video might consume as much as 100 GB of disk space. With only 10 hours of content per terabyte, storing raw video quickly proves impractical. Fortunately, compression can make a dramatic difference, squeezing video files down as much as a hundredfold. But even at 1 GB per hour, a large digital video collection still requires a significant amount of storage.

Recent advancements in storage technologies make it much easier to accommodate digital video's requirements. Since 80-GB hard drives are commonplace, it's now possible to work with fairly large amounts of video data on a computer workstation. Storage...