BayCHI Video Archive in the Cloud: What's the right format?

BayCHI has dozens of hours of SD video archived on tape.  I need 
advice on the best way to create an accessible archive.

I'm working on transferring the video to hard disk, so it will be 
available for publication.  That alone has been a struggle: We use 
184-minute DVCAM tapes.  That's the big DVCAM tape, not the little 
mini-DV tape, and DVCAM decks are expensive.  But I borrowed a deck, 
so I have a bunch of video on hard disk now.

But hard disk isn't a good archive format.  The tapes are more stable 
over the long term, but inaccessible.  So I'd like to archive this 
video in the cloud.  My plan is to publish the original video on the 
Internet Archive (so it's accessible) and also archive it on Amazon 
S3.  We already archive all of our original audio on Amazon S3.

(I really believe the studies that find the cloud costs less than the 
least expensive hard disk.  Especially in a volunteer org, where we 
can't count on future volunteers to manage physical hard disks and 
transfer the archive to new storage media as the old hard disks 
become obsolete.  Remember Zip Disks?  SCSI?)

Given bandwidth constraints and the cost of storage on Amazon S3, 
what's the right format? (Codec? File format? Not sure of the right 
terms.)  There's a lot I don't know about video.

I want to archive something close to the original data as it comes 
off the digital tape, because I want it to be useful to people years 
from now, when bandwidth, storage, processor power, and expectations 
of viewers are all have grown.  (We're already behind the times, 
since it's all SD, but we're very grateful to PARC for donating the 
equipment and staff to capture the SD video.)

Ignoring bandwidth for the moment, here are some back-of-the-envelope 
storage costs:

I believe the raw video off the tape is something like 15GB per 
hour.  We have something like 100 hours of tape, and we add two hours 
of tape per month.  On Amazon S3, that'd cost a little over $200 per 
month, and the monthly fee grows by around $50 each year as we add to 
the archive.  That's not out of the question, but I'd like to know if 
we can reduce those storage requirements by an order of magnitude, 
without making the archived video useless to future educators, 
researchers, and historians.

Do you archive the video of your usability studies?  Do you archive 
to the cloud?  What's your practice?

Thanks! 
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