AVI or QuickTime? (DV)

[r]Evolution wrote on 9/27/2003, 11:44 AM
I'm curious as to how many people are using uncompressed AVI's as compared to QuickTime. At home and at Work I use VEGAS and most always rely on AVI's as my /inputoutput source files. When talking to some others though I am finding that lots of them swear by the QuickTime format. In fact they say they use nothing but QuickTime, never using AVI's.

Is there a benefit to using one format over the other?

I'm not too happy about the way VEGAS 4 handles QuickTime. I feel as if I don't have as much clearity when using or exporting QuickTime as compared to AVI. I'm hoping some of you that have years in the business and know some of the reasons behind the madness of what we do and why we do it can shed some light on this.

Thanks in Advance,
Lamont

Comments

jetdv wrote on 9/27/2003, 2:19 PM
Use DV-AVI files. Vegas is optimized for DV-AVI files. Only use uncompressed AVI if you need to transfer to another application and/or need to maintain transparency. I only render to Quicktime for web files. I know some people render to quicktime to transfer to other programs as well.
TheHappyFriar wrote on 9/27/2003, 3:00 PM
Some capture cards (like Targa cards) capture Quicktime DV instead of AVI DV. It's just the preferance of the capture card, and firewire cards in Windows do AVI. On a Mac they do quicktime.

I haven't seen a difference between them though.
Spot|DSE wrote on 9/27/2003, 10:25 PM
Quicktime DV and 'avi' DV are the same thing, it's just a wrapper. You can have a variety of file extensions within or without QT. The issue is the codec, or lack of it with uncompressed files. Uncompressed files, whether avi, QT, or other format, are huge and hard for any system to playback realtime. Quicktime has great value in that it's totally ubiquitous, cross platform, cross application, and reads myriad codecs natively, plus whatever is installed. Vegas handles Quicktime PJPEG, MJPEG, and other formats that are used for delivery of stock footage exceptionally well.
Since QT isn't native in Vegas (or most any other app on the PC side) it's not going to be realtime framerates because Vegas is calling on an external application. This is also why tif files are so slow to render/playback in Vegas, because Vegas has to call on the QT app to read the tif files.
HTH