Video Editing: Source Video Format Question

[trinsic]

I have been using The DV format to edit in using Adobe Premiere Pro. But I was wondering if there was a better format to edit in beside that?

Does everyone use DV? or uncompressed?

Is there a format that offers better compress but can still be workable as an editing format?

[Blue_MiSfit]

It depends on the source. What are you editing? If it's stuff that was shot on a DV camera, then by all means edit in DV.

If you are editing stuff that you captured with a capture card, or generated with FRAPS or some other framegrabber, then you may want to edit in a compressed format. HuffYUV is a good choice, as Premiere can work directly with it pretty easily. CS3 is very good about this compared to earlier versions.

The problem is that HuffYVU and other lossless codecs compress a lot less than DV. As such, the number of simultaneous clips that you can real-time is a lot lower. So in other words, if you have 4 DV videos stacked in a timeline and it plays fine without rendering, you might only be able to get 2 HuffYUV clips to play fine without rendering. This is a limitation of the hard drive, because you have to force more data through.

~MiSfit

[niann]

DV is the best to use, video that is heavily compressed does not work well in Premiere. HuffYUV works well because it is a lossless compression, that doesn't throw out video data like Divx and XviD. (Nothing wrong with Divx and XviD for presentation codecs, however they just do not behave well for editing.)

Cheers!
-Niann

[trinsic]

Thanks guys, I think Ill use HuffYUV since I am ripping content from dvd.

[Ebobtron]

So your going to convert or re-encode to Huffy at somewhere around .8 to 1 gig per minute hope you got those really big hard drives.

Premiere is AviSynth friendly (or am I wrong), use DGIndex on the source files to get the d2v file and audio files. Then create a script using the following lines:
v = Mpeg2Source(your.d2v)
a = theneededaudiosourcefilter(.wav, .ac3)
audiodub(v,a)
real text book stuff

Your output acts like an uncompressed avi that is very searchable and fast enough to make editing enjoyable.

Large avi files are going to tax the fastest machines the buffering needed begins to slow down even very fast machines.

:)
Good luck.

[krisq]

Premiere is Avisynth friendly with this (http://videoeditorskit.sourceforge.net/) plugin :)

[adoniscik]

Doesn't PP edit MPEG-2? If so, you should be able to edit the video in its native format. Editing with a lossy codec is no more lossy than editing with a lossless one because you only render at the end. It's not like resaving a JPEG.

[Ebobtron]

@adoniscik
I am sure you are correct, that PP has a built in Mpeg2 decoder. My point is only to offer an alternative to encoding to Huffy and the huge file sizes. trinsic already seems to be looking for a solution that resides outside of PP. Though I have not tried it I believe that using my solution above, with the appropriate PP plug-in, will work as well an recoding to Huffy. If, of course, that is what trinsic is intending.
:) ta