HD - Motion JPEG-A vs Animation for home movies transferred to video ?

Question

Hi,
A vendor offers a "1560x1080p HD" transfer of home movie film to one of 4 formats.
We'd like to preserve as much useful information as possible in case the very old film deteriorates, but also would consider editing in future. The choices:
High Definition Quicktime Motion JPEG-A - 50GB per hour
High Definition Quicktime Component video ~ 290GB per hour
High Definition Quicktime Animation ~ 370GB per hour
High Definition Quicktime Raw ~ 490GB per hour
They suggest Motion JPEG-A as a "a very good compromise between high quality images and a reasonable data rate" for most users."
To my eye (on a 21" computer screen) their 2 second clips look about the same (but the source doesn't seem very sharp). My 2009 iMac doesn't seem to choke on playing 2 second clips of each format.
Any help in choosing which format to order would be appreciated.

Answer 1

As far as the codecs, my unschooled tendency has been to avoid lossy compression when possible. (I always keep an original TIFF (LZW) image when converting to JPEG for import to PPT...)
This is fine if you have sufficient disk space available. However, there is quite a range of data rates here. Motion JPEG would allow about 19 hours of content to be stored per TB of storage space available while RAW reduces that amount to less than 2 hours. Since it is likely you would want to use this format for long-term archival storage, whatever drive(s) you you use to hold the data would be, more or less, "dedicated" to this purposed for as long as you intend to hold onto the data. Further, it you want to protect the data by RAID redundancy, these storage capacities could be reduced by as much as half-- i.e., less than one hour of RAW content per TB of drive space to less than 10 hours of RAW compressed video. So one very important question is how many hours of content are you talking about and how many drives/drive systems are you willing to dedicate to the non-temporary storage of your content.
I have no video editing experience (outside of fumbling with MPEG Streamclip).
MPEG Streamclip is a very handy utility and works fine for cutting and merging segments. However, if you plan to add titles, transitions, layer addition sound tracks, work with theme styles, or apply "motion" effects, then you will likely want to do your editing in a dedicated video editing app. And, since iMovie is probably already available to you on your current system, it would likely be something you will "play" with at some time or another in conjunction with the content mentioned. Hover, if this is the case, you will not want to re-compress the files for editing in the iMovie '08 (or later) app. As previously mentioned, the "new" version of iMovie does not like the Animation codec. And, which it will accept and "edit" the content, when exported by iMovie, it produces a "black" display output and would not, therefor be a viable option for "native" iMovie editing. (Am assuming Apple still has not "fixed" this problem in the most recently released update but have not personally checked on this since this version only runs on an Intel platform and I do most of my editing on an old PPC G5 model.) Again, just a "heads up" in case you plan to go this route.
Current use of the transferred film might be to trim/edit segments to burn standard SD DVDs. I suppose the most far-out use of these 1080p files would be to make HD Bluray discs - in a future where both my Mac has a burner and my TV a player.
As previously indicated, SD DVDs would most likely limit your final encodings to 720x480 MPEG-2/AC3 or MPEG-2/PCM burns, any of the stated target compression formats would more than suffice. Further, even a 50 GB/hour format equates to something on the order of 110 Mbps or about 8 times what is typically used for SD Motion JPEG and should, as indicated, provide adequate "headroom" for "visual perception" equivalents. (I.e., your final quality will likely depend more on the quality of your source films than on the codec you select.) In fact, if the source fils are of really good quality, you may even be able to create short HD videos and burn them to DVD using the latest version of Toast. Of course, you would still need an HD player to view them. (There are, however, other issues with color sampling/space which may or may not be significant to you.)
In my case, the ease of work flow is just as important as the quality of the final product. The MJPEG format, in addition to requiring less non-temporary storage space (i.e., fewer drives/systems), also is, I believe, one of the formats that "thumbnail" most quickly in iMovie (and/or GarageBand). This may or may not be important to you as far as editing goes. As previously stated, it is also a video format that is native edit compatible with all versions of iMovie. As such, given what you've said thus far, I would lean toward recommending it as the more suitable compression format at this point.