i need to know what is the best compression if i am rendering straight cuts from vegas to premiere then to after effects then to premiere again to send to ulead dvd movie factory? in vegas the only option see for uncompressed video is under video for windows avi.

what is also a good compression rate where i will have smaller files and very unnoticeable loss in quality from original and then final footage after 5 generations?

Use a lossless codec like huffyuv.

ONce you get the video in, uncompress it and work on it all through the chain as uncompressed. Then feed that to your DVD authoring program or a MPEG compressor still as uncompressed.

That way you only go through 1 decode and 1 encode.

uncompressed is as the name suggests.
lossless codecs give the same quality as uncompressed as the name suggests, but they compress the video so file sizes aren't quite as large. Huffyuv will reduce uncompressed footage to something like 40%. It's free, so that's why I suggest it. :) Animation is another lossless codec, and I think it's also free.

Then there are lossy codecs like DV, which compress even more but can add artifacts.

But you have to be careful that the lossless codecs not only don't add an artifact or two but that they conserve the color correctly.

If they convert between color spaces, that can also mess up the video. Especially if the video is converted multiple times. If they keep it in YUV color space all the way through, then OK. But if they convert it to RGB and back, then that may not be OK.

i have the animation codec with quicktime 6. i used it in vegas. i aslo tried to render targa files, but it only comes out as a mov. thanks for the great advice. is hufyuv better than animation? what codec do i need to render stills from vegas?

i have also found this info very useful. i got the link from somewhere on this forum.


http://codecs.onerivermedia.com/

PNG (kind of like GIF except with some extra features like alpha channel and a lot less popular) and GIF are lossless formats that you can export stills to. Targa is a good format for video (but I forget why). TIFFs with LWZ compression are also lossless.

GIF is lossless, but it only supports up to 256 colors so I would not recommend using it for video or photos. It's better suited for graphics such as logos that have a limited color pallette.

DV video has only 8 bits (256 levels) per color. But some editing systems do run from 10 to 16 bits per color.

I mean 256 colors total for the entire image, not per color channel. In addition to video I also do graphics work, including designing web sites, and my impression from all that I have heard is that GIF is much more suited to images that have few colors without gradations, and JPEG is the format of choice for photos.

For more information, see this web page: http://www.scantips.com/basics9g.html.
A very informative table comparing TIF, PNG, GIF and JPG formats is here: http://www.scantips.com/basics09.html. (The link looks like the same page as above, but it does go to a different page).