Best 'changeable' codec

Brolli411 · Post by **Brolli411** » Tue Feb 11, 2003 11:14 pm

What I'm trying to say here, is what is the best codec to use if, in the future, I want to convert it back to HuffYUV. I'm looking for something that's not too big, maybe around 100-200 megs to store (for about 20-30 minuets of footage). I hope that's specific enough.

klinky · Post by **klinky** » Wed Feb 12, 2003 12:04 am

You could use MPEG4, like XviD Quant 1.

Maybe high bitrate MPEG2 as well.

No matter what, you're going to loose quality with those. HuffYUV is basically the smallest you're going to get before you start having to drop picture data.

~klinky

Zarxrax · Post by **Zarxrax** » Wed Feb 12, 2003 1:21 am

I find xvid at quant 1 is best at preserving quality, unless you set the mpeg-2 bitrate insanely high like 20,000kbit
At least, those are the results that I had the other day when I was messing with a video I had finished. I found that the xvid looked exactly the same as the original anywhere that I checked. Of course, it WASNT exactly the same mathematically, it just looked the same. (which is why you dont wanna compress it over and over even if you compress it with good quality like this.

jbone · Post by **jbone** » Wed Feb 12, 2003 9:30 am

Zarxrax wrote:I find xvid at quant 1 is best at preserving quality, unless you set the mpeg-2 bitrate insanely high like 20,000kbit
At least, those are the results that I had the other day when I was messing with a video I had finished. I found that the xvid looked exactly the same as the original anywhere that I checked. Of course, it WASNT exactly the same mathematically, it just looked the same. (which is why you dont wanna compress it over and over even if you compress it with good quality like this.

It may look good, but it wouldn't recompress very well, even if you turn it into a Huffyuv file first. Too much visual data is lost in the conversion to MPEG-4, even if it's not visible to the naked eye.

Quu · Post by **Quu** » Wed Feb 12, 2003 11:07 am

i like the idea of storeing it as insanly high bitrate mpeg-2... because then if you want to export it to tape.... you can just use a H+ or a NetStream2000 and not have to do any further conversions

WilLoW :--) · Post by **WilLoW :--)** » Wed Feb 12, 2003 12:58 pm

I like DV...(despite it's resolution and fps limitations),
and it takes 5 times less space than HuffYUV

RadicalEd0 · Post by **RadicalEd0** » Wed Feb 12, 2003 2:52 pm

I was under the impression that DV was 5:1 compression, Huffyuv in yuy2 is about 4:1. It's about 4/5ths the size of huffyuv maybe :|

Brolli411 · Post by **Brolli411** » Wed Feb 12, 2003 4:03 pm

WilLoW :--) wrote:I like DV...(despite it's resolution and fps limitations),
and it takes 5 times less space than HuffYUV

With the size of my HuffYUV files, I'd still have about 1 gig/ea.

the Black Monarch · Post by **the Black Monarch** » Thu Feb 13, 2003 5:16 am

I used to have DivX files set to 1-pass quality-based @ 100% quality. They worked fantastically; you could still see the interlacing lines and everything.

The Wired Knight · Post by **The Wired Knight** » Thu Feb 13, 2003 2:25 pm

I like to use HuffyUV for all my AVIs when editing because it appears to be the most widly accepted to other programs, however when I export, DV2AVI is the one I prefer to save myself some file size without considerable loss in quality. For MPEGs which I only use for file sharing I only encode in mpeg-2.