Difference Between Rendering Uncompressed AVI and Microsoft avi or etc...

[TJIsACoolGuy]

I have used vegas for quite a while now and feel that I have a good handle on everything. One thing has always bothered me about it though, if the file size for the clips that you capture using sony capture are the size of standard microsoft avi's....and those are the original source data which should look and be as good as they are going to get (fully uncompressed) than what is the uncompressed avi option when you render out? And the file sizes are huge? If you were to work with DVX footage at fully uncompressed quality--the best you are able to achieve...do you need to capture to this format? Is there a way to? And if not...what would be the benefit to going to that size a file? Does anyone else see my point here?

 

[scharky]

Capturing to an uncompressed codec with DV footage will give you a really huge file, with the exact same information as you get using the DV-avi codec. When written to tape, all mini DV cameras are using a DV codec, the compression is done in the camera. When capturing the footage, you are essentially transfering the data from the camera to the Hard disk. Since the footage is allready compressed, saving to an uncompressed file format is useless, unless, you plan to run the footage through several generations of compositing, greenscreening or other effects.

 

[Barry_Green]

Exactly. If you are just capturing the footage, DV footage is kept on disk in the same compressed format it starts out in (in the camera). It's an exact copy of what's on the camera tape. So when you edit it, the NLE uncompresses it, and works with it internally as uncompressed. So capturing as "uncompressed" would only result in your file taking up 8x as much space as it needs to, and give you no benefit whatsoever.

Now, if you're rendering/compositing sections down, or exporting to After Effects or something like that, that's when "uncompressed" can come into play. You don't want to continually export and re-import footage using DV (or any other type of) compression, as it'll cause compression generation loss each time you do so. So if you want to work on a sequence in After Effects, you'd render out that section as "uncompressed", import it into AE, work on it, and re-export it as 'uncompressed'. That way your footage won't be taking multiple generation recompressions.

But as for the original source footage, you want that to stay in DV compression, since that's what the camera recorded it as.