I'm cleaning up my hard drives making room for my upcoming HDV projects and I'm wondering about my completed projects that I've rendered to AVIs. I was thinking of trashing my completed rendered MPGs and archiving the AVIs for old projects.

If someday I render in Vegas an old completed project AVI to MPG2, will the newly rendered MPG2 suffer from the original MPG2 that was rendered in Vegas from the project veg file?

What I'm trying to ask is, which project file would be best to keep for archiving, the AVI or MPG? Since I have the completed project AVI on tape, I'm thinking of trashing the AVIs on disk and keeping the MPGs. That would save me a lot of disk space. Hopefully now my question makes a little more sense.

Thanks.

Bump for clarification.

Good question.I think it depends on a couple of things.
Will you ever need to re-edit?How important the project?
If you have all the original footage on tape and save the project file and any additional audio,photos and external graphic file, you could recapture the footage at a later date.Then edit and render to what ever you want.
What I do with important projects is keep all captured footage and additional files on an external drive and store the drive.
If you won't need to re-edit, then store the finished AVI and the finished MPG2.
The reason is, if you rerender the finished AVI to MPG2, rather than rendering to MPG2 from the project, then the transitions may show a bit of degradation becuase they are rendered twice.(once to AVI and again to MPG2)

Thanks Jack. I don't think I would ever have the need to edit my finished and archived projects, but I generally try to keep the veg, vidcap, and dar files.

I didn't realized the transistions would suffer a loss going from AVI to MPG2, so thanks for the explanation. If I'm not going to re-edit the AVIs some day, why not just keep the MPG2s? My delivery media is always DVD. The only reason that comes to mind is if someday I want to rerender the AVI to a different file type than a MPG2.

Exactly.Going to another format would be better done from the AVI.
If this is a small project you could burn the finished AVI, MPG2,vidcap,veg and other files to a couple of DVDs as data.Keep the MPG2 on your drive, if you want fast access.
I keep AVI because who knows what new format may arrive tomorrow.

I'm going the other direction - archiving mpeg-2 and dumping the .avi files. Rationale: none of my stuff is mission critical (i.e., paying clients), mpeg editing has advanced pretty well in Vegas if I really need it, most of my stuff is delivered on DVD or .wmv.

.Avi's are probably better if you're ever going to switch formats, but I don't expect to