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I have some old quicktime movies from a project I did in 2005. The client came back recently and wants to do some changes and run off a new version, and since I've got all his media restored at the moment I think I'm going to reencode my workprint videos into something more standard.

The movies I have are Miro DC30+ MJPEG quicktimes, 320x240, which at the time was pretty standard. I'd like to reencode them as something that's liable to be readable in 5-10 years, I got lucky that the DC30 MJPEG was readable at all. I was thinking Apple ProRes, since so much gear seems to read this nowadays...

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  • Are you sure it was 2005? By the late 90s, early 2000s even consumer gear had moved over primarily to DV at 720 by 480 resolution. The last major platform I used that was quarter res based was an Amiga Video Toaster and that was fairly early 90s tech. By 2005, an unaided consumer PC could handle editing full resolution DV without issue.
    – AJ Henderson ♦
    Dec 1, 2014 at 15:00
  • No, they're from 2004; they were work pictures meant to work with Pro Tools, and Pro Tools has always had squirrely sync issues with DV picture, DC30 was still pretty common until the Apple started shipping PCI-X (I recall). These were probably originally 640x480 captures to DC30 from an SVHS telecine. MJPEG pix was also a lot smaller and 200 GB was considered a big hard drive. I think I have Radius VideoVision (NuBus!) picture from 2000 in here somewhere...
    – iluvcapra
    Dec 1, 2014 at 18:50
  • Ah, gotcha. That makes more sense. Personally I was a PC/Matrox guy. I have lots of archival Matrox MJPEG footage (at 720 by 480) from before they switched to having DV support and eventually moving off the Matrox RT tech all together when PCs got fast enough. I have LOTS of DVD-Rs and HDDs sitting around though.
    – AJ Henderson ♦
    Dec 1, 2014 at 18:53

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For such low quality footage (320 by 240 was quarter resolution even in the early 2000s), I'd probably go with DV format. It's a major video standard that, while not used much anymore (though HDV is still used), was a major video standard and thus isn't going anywhere quickly (just look at how MPEG-1 has hung around). It is designed for high quality video in SD formats and was one of the most common standards for that type of video even at the time of your project.

Many of the MJPEG formats were a pain even when they were new. I know I had issues with my Matrox MJPEG format content not working without some level of difficulty even when it was current. DV on the other hand, I've never had a problem with anywhere, including current systems.

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