Lossless codecs for REAL editors

[BasharOfTheAges]

it's still not what you know, it's who you know. /cynic

[Castor Troy]

make your own shit

fixed.

[pan_dbgt01]

I'm curious because when I render uncompressed it's always choppy. I'm wondering if I'm missing something? I do like Lagarith, but I lose colour when compressing 90% of the time. Is there a way to get Vegas to recognize Huff? Anyways.....thought I'd ask because these issues are driving me CRAZY! Thanks!

[Nya-chan Production]

I'm curious because when I render uncompressed it's always choppy. I'm wondering if I'm missing something? I do like Lagarith, but I lose colour when compressing 90% of the time. Is there a way to get Vegas to recognize Huff? Anyways.....thought I'd ask because these issues are driving me CRAZY! Thanks!

Try setting it manually to other color space (RGB/YUV)? And choppy... sounds like something wrong in your render settings, if in Vegas it doesn't show up choppy. Most probably some interlacing setting, project or render.

[BasharOfTheAges]

If by "choppy" you mean laggy and if by "when I render uncompressed" you mean you're watching the uncompressed video in a media player or something, that just means your computer isn't powerful enough to play it in real time. That rarely matters, as you're not really meant to play the uncompressed file back in real time in a media player.

If it's laggy in your NLE, you should look at how you have it set up to render previews. Most times it shouldn't be laggy in that case because previews aren't full size and they're normally compressed at least a little bit. If you're trying to viw your previews at full size without pre-rendering them in some lossless codec inside your NLE, you're going to run into the same hardware bottleneck problems you'd have trying to run them with a media player.

[Phantasmagoriat]

I wouldn't necessarily say his computer is not powerful enough, since the speed of uncompressed footage has little to do with decoding ability. Depends what you mean by power I guess. Sometimes read/write speeds become the limiting factor if files are so large they can't be read off the disc fast enough; especially if you are trying for real-time playback. That is usually the case for fully uncompressed footage; or if you've got something like a higher resolution/framerate that's bloating your filesize. It could also be any number of other factors like a slow disc (5400rpm is common in laptops for energy conservation); or if the file is highly fragmented on disc (when was the last time you ran a defrag progam...). But it's probably just the files are too large, and not meant for real-time playback, like Bashar said.

However, I still recommend using Uncompressed for exporting your amv. This gives you full control of file compression afterwards.

Also, try using Ut Video for editing. It's faster than both Lags or Huff. Or try to get proxy-editing to work-- not only can you retain full quality, but it also overcomes the bottleneck of disc transfer speed.

[BasharOfTheAges]

Oversimplification of jargon (because people are generally clueless about hardware concepts) on my part. Sadly, "your system has a hardware bottleneck in playback" doesn't roll off the tongue as nicely either.

The take-away that's important, though, is that most home computer systems are deficient in this regard unless they're really high-end devices.

[Vlad G Pohnert]

I have to agree that it's all relavent to what you do.

For myself I use a Matrox Pro Editing card and run in DV for videos I do in SD and then in a modifed codec ustalized for the card when runnign in HD as it has realtime output so I can see what it will look like exactly on a TV monitor. I do however output my final files in uncompressed or one of the lossless codec (liek Huffy, etc) and archive those... Matrox also provides the software codecs too so I don't need the card to open the timeline in the future if I ever have to.

Vlad

[pan_dbgt01]

Hmmm......I can play Lagarith files for some reason and they play fine. I have tried UT Video.....but that doesn't play so I'm not sure how to preview it.

[Nya-chan Production]

Hmmm......I can play Lagarith files for some reason and they play fine. I have tried UT Video.....but that doesn't play so I'm not sure how to preview it.

For Vegas, selecting a short part and pressing Shift + B saves the part in RAM (until you run out of allocated memory) and makes the preview play smooth.