moderator notice: this thread was split of from another
thread: http://www.dvinfo.net/conf/showthread.php?s=&threadid=33082

DVD? Give it to me on miniDV--I don't want no compression.

Josh: DV is 5:1 lossy compressed, sorry!

I'm rolling my eyes. Still less compressed than getting it on DVD.

True, I just wanted to make the remark because it is a large
"myth" that DV is uncompressed, especially in the people who
are knew to this, you never know who might be reading the
things you write Josh!

See.. I didn't know that.. about compression. What would be uncompressed then if I might ask?

Thanks.

Well, it has no other name than uncompressed. When you export
to AVI or QuickTime you can either choose "none" for the codec
or choose "uncompressed" and it will write a .AVI or .MOV file with
the full RGB uncompressed information in there.

To slightly expand the topic a bit futher: there are two forms of
compression: lossy and lossless (I'm not gonna talk about near
lossless now).

Lossy tosses information out to reduce information, DV, MPEG,
AC3, dts, MP3, Sorenson are all lossy compression formats.

There are also lossless compression formats that compress
material by looking for patterns that can be reduced without
throwing out actual information. Examples of these are ZIP,
RAR and for video HUFFYUV (among others).

I've heard about this. . .

But you can't get a better picture than what you started with, right?

If I import clips off my tape, into Vegas, for example, and then render one as "uncompressed", or one of the lossless codecs, I'm not improving anything, am I? I remember doing this a while back, and the file sizes were huge, compared to what they should have been for how long the clips were.

Uncompressed can be handy if you need to transfer footage
between applications and you can thus save on extra generational
loss.

The clips certainly are huge in uncompressed (de-compressing
a compressed file always gets bigger -> like a ZIP file).

For example:

720 x 480 x 30 fps x 3 colors = almost 30 MB/s or 1.75 GB/min.