[WEB4LIB] Re: [Formats for audio/video in electronic theses]

[Leo Robert Klein]

At 02:57 PM 6/18/2001 -0700, Mark Jordan wrote:
>You wrote:
>
> > You might want to think about storing the video in Quicktime using the
> > Animation codec set at little or no compression. You can then burn this
> > to a CD-ROM. This is a common enough solution for people in the multimedia
> > biz and it might work for you as well.
>
>As far as I know, QuickTime is a proprietary format so adopting it for
>theses material would force the use of Apple software to access or
>manipulate the material in the future. Since the multimedia biz is heavily
>Apple-centric, this may not be a problem for people in that business. Or
>does Apple make the specification for QuickTime open to anyone, as Adobe
>does for PDF?
>
>Defacto standards like PDF and QuickTime are good for display and
>delivery, but they change frequently and at the whim of the company that
>controls them. It's the mid-to-long term storage of the files that I'm
>more worried about.

Had you saved the file in Quicktime five years ago, you still would have 
been able to use it today -- on both a Mac and a PC.  Wasn't that the spec?

I wouldn't be too ready to dismiss a format as pariah simply because it is 
proprietary -- not in DV and not if it had a long tradition of working best 
in some of the most common DV applications including Adobe Premiere or 
AfterEffects -- i.e. things your own students are likely to get their hands 
on.  If you dismiss it out of hand, you risk placing yourself at the mercy 
of formats that may not be as well supported either back-end or front-end.

FWIW, Quicktime was accepted as the basis of MPEG4 almost two years ago.  See:
    http://www.apple.com/pr/library/1998/feb/11iso.html

When that'll come out is anybody's guess.

LEO
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