dvcpro hd is a great working resolution, but for internet purposes it is too big. Download times would be unreasonable and not many computers are equipped to play it back smoothly. Since maximum quality is a goal in all aspects h.264 compressed movies were chosen as the 'internet presentation resolution'
The downside of h.264 is that it requires considerable cpu resources during compression. Since the datalab workflow was based entirely on commodity hardware this could be overcome relative inexpensively.
