Xvid compression questions Re: image quality and HD space

Scaledkittah · Post by **Scaledkittah** » Wed Aug 15, 2007 9:09 pm

So I've been wanting to take a break from playing with full metal alchemist footage, and try one of the other anime's I have. The problem is all of FMA is taking up the entire HD I bought to store footage on.

This is where I noticed that Xvid's two pass compression in VMD is a great space saver, I mean it took the raw 5gig premiere export for my Lust vid and got it down to 50ish megs.

So the question I have is this. If I did this series of steps...

#1: Open newly ripped Dgi file in VMD, and do a two pass compression. Along with an AVIsynth script for image cleanup. And try and make my DvD rips as small as possible.
#2 Use these rips as my clips in Premiere 6.5
#3 Export from Premiere an uncompressed RGB clip (It crashes when I try to use suggested codecs)
#4 put the RGB clip into VMD, do another two pass compression with Xvid, and any other cleanup needed for a finished AMV

...Will this cause any problems for me in terms of image quality, syncing with audio, etc? I know compressing something that's already been compressed isn't advised, just not sure how it'd work technically between step 3 and 4.

That and if there is a simpler method to save some HD space, could anyone fill me on how to do so please?

BasharOfTheAges · Post by **BasharOfTheAges** » Wed Aug 15, 2007 10:02 pm

Dispite the fact that Vicbond's guide still says to compress to a lossy codec before editing, it's generally assumed to be a horrible idea. That said, don't do it! Compress with a losless codec such as HuffYUV of Lagrynth and edit with that. HDD space woes? Make clips before hand and only save those losslessly. Don't want to? Buy a bigger HDD or learn to make consessions.