basic exporting issues, and more...

[seasons]

I'm making my first AMV and just finished the editing phases and think I'm ready to export, compress, and get it ready to possibly upload to the Org. In anticipation of all of this, even before I started planning it in detail, I installed the AMVapp, took time to print out and read the guides and to highlight portions that looked most important. I'm pretty sure I correctly ripped footage from my DVDs, made project files for the .VOB files, de-interlaced the video prior to editing, and imported the .avs files into Adobe Premiere Pro CS4. From there, it was all smooth sailing.

Now that I'm finished, I'm ready to export, but returning to the guides I'm confronted with an array of options and issues that I hadn't taken into consideration before. I'm running into a number of problems that I don't even know how to explain, so I just want to take things one step at a time to make sure I haven't made any mistakes. In the past day or two, I'd stumbled ahead through a few different steps in a really confusing way that I'm not even going to begin trying to describe. It's probably better to begin with a few basic things and to go from there. Since I don't know if my problem lies in my scripts or in how I'm exporting, I posted in the General Video forum, but if this thread needs to be moved to a more suitable place, that's fine too.

Anyway, I'd taken scenes from a few different episodes of the series I'm making an AMV for, so I've got 5 different .VOB files and 5 different .avs scrips out of them. Prior to editing in Adobe Premiere, they all look like this (numbers added here just to show the different lines of the script):
1. MPEG2Source("C:\Users\Preferred User\Desktop\DGIndexProjectFiles\Eva24.d2v", CPU=4)
2. AMVIVTC(mode=1)
3. TTempSmooth()
4. ConvertToRGB32()

Hopefully I haven't made any facepalmingly awful mistakes. I think I'm correctly grasping the concept behind Avisynth. If not, well... I know, read the guides.

So I'm finished editing. I'm in Adobe Premiere CS4 and when I go to export the file as an AVI, I don't know whether to go with "Microsoft AVI" (which gets me the choice of the following codecs)...







or to choose "Uncompressed Microsoft AVI," which gets me these two mysterious choices as video codecs...





I get the feeling I'm supposed to choose the commonly-recommended and talked about Huffyuv or Lagarith because "they're lossless" and uncompressed (is this true?). Thus, to get these I'd have to choose "Microsoft AVI" as my format. Or, have I misunderstood, and I'm supposed to choose "Uncompressed Microsoft AVI", and if so, which of the two codecs for that should I pick?

If I've come away with anything from reading the guides and lots of threads on the forums, it's that there's no single right choice for everyone to follow when they're exporting and compressing their videos, but despite my efforts to find answers to these specific questions there and elsewhere, I'm kind of stuck and can't figure out what to do here. I'd tried a few of these before and boldly charged ahead into post-production but been confounded by my results, and I just want to start over from these basic steps to make sure I'm doing it right. Any advice about these issues would really be appreciated. I know this is basic stuff but you really can't dumb these things down too much for me.

Thanks.

[Scintilla]

Uncompressed and lossless are not quite the same thing.
Uncompressed implies lossless, but the reverse is not true.

HuffYUV and Lagarith are both lossless codecs, which means that the end result is pixel-for-pixel identical to what you put into the encoder (barring any colorspace conversions), so no generational fidelity loss. But they still compress the file, saving you HD space compared to uncompressed -- think of ZIP compression (in fact, HuffYUV uses the same algorithm).

"Microsoft AVI" is definitely the way to go here. The only time anyone should really be exporting uncompressed is if his/her edting program simply won't produce the file properly any other way (which, thankfully, is quite rare). Otherwise it's a waste of space.

[seasons]

Thanks for the explanation. That's just what I needed to know and I think I'm where I need to be at this point, which is to say that this video is finally finished, I think.

I still had a persistent problem that seems a lot like the one described here, but I was able to crop most of it away in AviSynth and I'm not unhappy with the final results. Live and learn.