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I called Seagate and asked them about transferring from one external drive to another, I was told if I do this that the videos will lose quality, is this true? He said if the 1st external hard drive stopped working that the 2nd one will be left with videos of a lower quality and that if I transfer everything to a 3rd external hard drive that this will have even lower quality
If this is true then this means it's not even worth buying another external drive and if it stops working then that's it, it's over and that I should have bought 2 at the same time and only transfer data from the computer to each of them
Video files on a computer are digital. When you do exact copy of the file from one media to another, you don't lose video quality. It doesn't matter if the file is located on your C: drive, USB, CD or DVD. If the filers are the same, the video quality is the same.
just to be sure, is dragging files the same thing as copying and pasting? Don't know why this person told me. He works for Seagate customer service, that's the only reason why I am thinking about not buying another hard drive for backup.
I called Seagate and asked them about transferring from one external drive to another, I was told if I do this that the videos will lose quality, is this true? He said if the 1st external hard drive stopped working that the 2nd one will be left with videos of a lower quality and that if I transfer everything to a 3rd external hard drive that this will have even lower quality
If this is true then this means it's not even worth buying another external drive and if it stops working then that's it, it's over and that I should have bought 2 at the same time and only transfer data from the computer to each of them
The only time you lose quality on video is compressing it or re-compressing it and that only applies to compressed format like MPEG, WMV etc. This would only occur in video editing/conversion program.
Formats like MPEG reduce file sizes in video by removing redundant data. In an uncompressed format each frame of video is stored in it's entirety. MPEG only stores information that changes from each frame, this is why if you are watching a video that has little action it can look fantastic and will look like crap once some action occurs if there is not sufficient bitrate.
Each time you re-compress a little more information gets thrown away.
The only time you lose quality on video is compressing it or re-compressing it and that only applies to compressed format like MPEG, WMV etc. This would only occur in video editing/conversion program.
Formats like MPEG reduce file sizes in video by removing redundant data. In an uncompressed format each frame of video is stored in it's entirety. MPEG only stores information that changes from each frame, this is why if you are watching a video that has little action it can look fantastic and will look like crap once some action occurs if there is not sufficient bitrate.
Each time you re-compress a little more information gets thrown away.
I had to convert a lot of the videos from mkv to wmv in order to watch them and I drag them to the external hard drive. Are you saying if I drag these wmv from this drive to a new drive that it will lose quality?
I had to convert a lot of the videos from mkv to wmv in order to watch them and I drag them to the external hard drive. Are you saying if I drag these wmv from this drive to a new drive that it will lose quality?
The converted files are completely portable. You can move them to once drive or one thousand drives, this is EXACTLY what happens with "video sharing" and there is NO LOSS of quality from the movement.
You can use any tools you want to do this -- manually dragging the files works, scripts work, web sites work, transfers to a cloud service, etc...
If you decide to compress the whole contents of the drive and then back that up you will need to decompress that archive but so long as you use take the time to expand the files there will be NO loss of quality.
As someone else said, the "support person" at Seagate was incorrect and/or their answer was not relevent to what you want to do.
I called Seagate and asked them about transferring from one external drive to another, I was told if I do this that the videos will lose quality, is this true?
Absolutely not true! I have been doing this at work and at home for over 15 years... Various videos and many other types of computer files.
I have been keeping my backups on various external drives.
However, I have met a few people who have converted their videos to other formats to save disk space which I consider to be a bad idea. I keep all my original videos which come from the video camera...
The only time you lose quality on video is compressing it or re-compressing it and that only applies to compressed format like MPEG, WMV etc. This would only occur in video editing/conversion program.
Formats like MPEG reduce file sizes in video by removing redundant data. In an uncompressed format each frame of video is stored in it's entirety. MPEG only stores information that changes from each frame, this is why if you are watching a video that has little action it can look fantastic and will look like crap once some action occurs if there is not sufficient bitrate.
Each time you re-compress a little more information gets thrown away.
The loss is only true for lossy compression like jpg. However, there are no video formats that are not lossy. Still pictures and audio have several lossless formats (codecs).
That said, copying a digital file would never change it.
Absolutely not true! I have been doing this at work and at home for over 15 years... Various videos and many other types of computer files.
I have been keeping my backups on various external drives.
However, I have met a few people who have converted their videos to other formats to save disk space which I consider to be a bad idea. I keep all my original videos which come from the video camera...
the ONLY reason they were converted was because they could not be viewed on windows media player and they weren't from any video camera either, files that were downloaded online
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Some one is not clear on the concept...
