Question:

[John Jay Smith]

I want to make some videos that I will later use
to edit them and convert them.

In what format/codec/compression should
I save these videos that I will later use?

Raw avi is the best quality, but I am sure it will make huge files....

any ideas? thanks...

 

[Rehan]

For best quality you should keep the videos in their original format during
different editing stages. The raw AVI is not a well defined format. You can
have an uncompressed AVI which saves each frame as an image file. This would
constitute huge disk space: 640x480x3x30 bytes/sec = 26Mb/sec ~ 90 Gb/hr

If your video is on tape, you can capture it in DV AVI format which is
somewhat compressed: 13 Gb/hr. But it would have very good quality retention
during editing (in principle at least). Ideally you should record, edit and
save in DV AVI.

However there are some issues with DV AVI in Windows Moviemaker, for example
it drops one frame for every clip in this format.

 

[Mike Lowery]

However there are some issues with DV AVI in Windows Moviemaker, for example
it drops one frame for every clip in this format.

Can you elaborate? At what point does it drop this frame?

 

[Bernadette]

see the section about Generational Losses on my Problem Solving > Video
Issues page

PapaJohn
www.papajohn.org