Video

What type of video files does ELAR archive?

ELAR archives digital video files. Many decisions need to be made about the quality and format of the video files you produce and archive. ELAR prefers to archive the most appropriate quality for the genre of video file. Below we call the video files that you actually archive the "archive object". Wherever possible, video should be provided in the format variously called MPEG4, AVCHD, or H.264.

Genres and sizes

Files from current video cameras are typically AVCHD (sometimes called "MTS") files. Many documenters do not work with this (high) quality file format and need to produce smaller more compressed files to use for their work, typically MP4 or MPEG. Some documenters will want to maintain the high quality of the original files as the video is a unique visual record of important cultural information. Video files can have frame sizes ranging from 720 x 540 to 1440 x 1080 , and compression levels from low to high.

Often a video file is produced in order to do the documentation or research (e.g. used for annotation in ELAN or for elicitation). Typically these files will be smaller in frame size than the original and compressed to play smoothly with the software used on a laptop. In such cases, we advise archiving this file in this format; the archive object is your "working file", not the original file from the camera.

On the other hand, for documentary/anthropological/topological/detailed visual study materials, we archive the best format that retains the quality intended by the filmmaker. We expect that this type of material would be well planned, edited and ordered into manageable sized files with descriptive time-based information. We encourage language documenters to understand the nature of this category when filming and to identify these videos both organisationally and in metadata when depositing such video material.

You should maintain technical metadata indicating the formats of your video files. It is especially important that your metadata keeps track of various versions you create from an original video and any conversion settings that you have applied. Send the relevant parts of this metadata to ELAR when you archive your video.

We prefer to receive video files rather than DVDs. DVDs have often been conceived as a collection of different videos each with different metadata, but are in the form of DVD "chapters". This means that we have to "reverse engineer" into its separate video files in order to archive it and present it for access. The main exception to this preference is if the DVD itself is a cultural object, for example the result of a project for or by the language community. This type of DVD could be archived as a downloadable ISO image for users to burn and play as a disc. If this is the case, you should inform us so that we prepare both normal video files and downloadable disc images.