Basically, I am trying to record as many videos as humanly possible for my daughter (who is now 6), but the videos will be for all stages of her life, from kid to teen to adult. I know I won’t be there for her, so I’m hoping that through these videos I can still “be there for her” at least somewhat and also teach her life lessons and such. Basically, I’m kinda trying to do what Superman’s dad did for him, like where he puts in the crystal and the AI hologram of his dad appears and talks to him and teaches him lessons or just hangs out with him. Well, I don’t have a fortress of solitude or an AI hologram crystal, but I got this IPhone 15 Pro Max. Hopefully that will be enough.
I just recorded my first video on this phone for my daughter. I used 4K at 24 fps, to see if I could give the video more of a cinematic type feel. The video was a few minutes over an hour and was like 14.5GB! I’m using “Apple ProRes” video format with HDR as the “format encoder”.
I really want to film the videos for her in 4K if I can, because I am trying to future-proof the videos as much as humanly possible. I am thinking she could be watching these videos 50 plus years from now and I feel like 4K should help them hopefully hold up better.
I just wanted to ask you guys if there is a good way for me to film these videos in 4K, but maybe use some format that helps save a bit on file space. Because I believe the videos I have recorded in 4K 60fps on my PC (I have an elgato facecam pro with a SM7B mic), that are all about an hour long only came out to 1-2 GB’s or so, where as this iPhone video is 14GB! Although it is appealing to use a format that allows for the best editing options in the future, I cannot justify the storage space usage and over all extra cost this would bring upon me in the future trying to find ways to store these videos. So I definitely need some kinda 4K format that maybe has some compression or something, but will hopefully get my file sizes down to about a GB or two for an hour of footage.
If y’all have any tips for me on this I would be really appreciative! Thanks so much!
While many have already pointed out, most likely 4k60p without ProRes is enough to be future proof. You do not need the ProRes extra info for editing.
But there are some other respects regarding to the archiving that might be more concerning. Any flash storage like SSDs or flash drives might loose the stored information if not used frequently.
Cloud storage or private YouTube sounds like a good solution, but there is a risk that the current rules for storage that you agree to might change in the future and this means that you might lose some videos if the storage rule changes or there are new activity requirements.
By looking at the past few decades I can see that the best archive media (taking into account accessibility and availability in past 20 years) would be a physical optical disk such as a DVD/BlueRay. So I would also strongly recommend to also prepare some physical disks as backup. Now the next question is where to store them long term.