Many USGS research programs involve the gathering of underwater seafloor video footage. This footage was captured on a variety of media, including Beta III and VHS tapes. Much of this media is now deteriorating, prompting the migration of this video footage onto DVD-Video discs. Advantages of using DVD-Video discs are: less storage space, ease of transport, wider distribution, and non-degradational viewing of the media.

The videos in this particular collection (328 of them) were made on the ocean floor under President Reagan's Exclusive Economic Zone proclamation of 1983. There are now five copies of these 328 discs in existence: at the USGS libraries in Menlo Park, Calif., Denver, Colo., and Reston, Va.; at the USGS Publications Warehouse (masters from which to make copies for customers); and Hank Chezar's USGS Western Coastal and Marine Geology team archives.

The purpose of Open-File Report 2004-1101 is to provide users with a listing of the available DVD-Video discs (with their Open-File Report numbers) along with a brief description of their associated USGS research activities. Each disc was created by first encoding the source video and audio into MPEG-2 streams using the MediaPress Pro hardware encoder. A menu for the disc was then made using Adobe Photoshop 6.0. The disc was then authored using DVD Studio Pro and subsequently written onto a DVD-R recordable disc.