I just tried Lagarith lossless codec on some DV AVI and it was 2.8 times bigger. Cineform was only 1.2 times bigger.

The Sony DV codec inside Vegas is basically the best DV codec there is, and a reason why some people moved to Vegas in the early days. But, as far as I know, it's only accessible from within Vegas. But rendering to it in Vegas after adding effects or whatever in Vegas is a very sound strategy.

Won't AE open DV files with some native Adobe DV codec or with the Microsoft DV codec? If not, the Cedocida codec is an excellent open source codec. If you're transferring DV I don't think I'd bother with anything other than DV codecs.

Thank you both for your advice. I demoed Cineform Pro and it didn't seem any better at coding DV than the Sony codec. Although maybe it's possible to tweak the codec to get a better result. The best quality is uncompressed and as long as I don't have too many very long files it seems the best option. Even uncompressed appears only slightly better than Sony compressed so I don't think editing degrades the quality unless the film has been through a lot of recoding.

You are unlikely to see a difference after one coding. The point is, after multiple recodings which one stands up better. Of course if you don't plan to do multiple recodings or can use smart rendering then it is a moot point.

First of all, DV files are not uncompressed and they have rather limited color sampling as well. DV is the NTSC world is 4:1:1 color sampling, DV in PAL is 4:2:0. Neither is optimal but PAL DV is less optimal. Multigeneration work in 4:2:0 is much more subject to visible degradation than multigeneration work in 4:1:1, although neither is particularly good. For more information on color sampling, see this Adam Wilt page:

http://www.adamwilt.com/DV-FAQ-tech.html#colorSampling

The bottom line is that for ultimate quality, it is better to render to a lossless codec like Lagarith, or a visually lossless codec like Cineform (which is 4:2:2) when exporting an intermediate file for work in After Effects. If filesize is an issue, I'd go with Cineform.

You can get a free version of the Cineform codec here:

http://gopro.com/3d-cineform-studio-software-download/

It will likely do what you need.

Thanks for the info. I'm still not clear about why one codec is better than another. I've encoded with,

Lagarith - Bits/(Pixel*Frame): 6.828
Cineform - Bits/(Pixel*Frame): 9.718
Uncompressed - Bits/(Pixel*Frame): 32.000

Cineform seems to have better colour depth but if the uncompressed is using more pixels per frame shouldn't that be better at retaining detailed information in the image?

Overall I prefer the Cineform because of the colour depth but Lagarith is not far behind. Cineform costs $299 and Lagarith is free so I'm not sure if Cineform will be worth investing in.

Lagarith and uncompressed are making no changes to the video content, so they should give identical quality to the original. Cineform will make a small but usually insignificant change.

John Cline has just pointed out that you can get a free version of Cineform.

The GoPro version linked by John puts a huge 'License Err' sign over the encoded video so it's not free or any use. What's the difference between the GoPro version and the $299 Studio Premium anyway?

http://cineform.com/products/gopro-cineform-studio-premium?

Can I render in Vegas using the GoPro version or is it standalone? I need to be able to render in Vegas and After Effects.

Cineform definitely improves the appearance of colour but I think it very slightly loses some colour range detail. For example on a blue shirt the blue is stronger but there are slightly less range of blues. It's like turning up the saturation and contrast.

First of all, get the very latest GoPro codec from as described in [url=. You'll get the license error if you try to use RGB 4:4:4 options and don't have a paid Cineform product installed, but you shouldn't if you use YUV 4:2:2 (in the "configure" options). I'm not sure which encoding quality is best but I see that "filmscan" give larger files than "high" so is presumably less lossy.

But in your case I doubt Cineform is your best bet anyway. If you go lossless instead of DV or Cineform, there is also the UT video codec as well as Lagarith. It's the fastest decoding lossless codec I've found, so worth considering if your preview is dropping frames with Lagarith. But the files are slightly larger.

Larger file size with more bits per pixel is not always indicative of better quality. In the case of Lagarith vs. Cineform it means that Lagarith does a better job preserving the information while squeezing it into less space. MP4 can achieve better quality in fewer bytes than MPEG 1 or 2, and at the same bitrate it is stunning in comparison.

Heck, SONY's DV and Microsoft's DV codec produce exactly the same size files, exactly the same bits per pixel, but the quality difference is astounding.

Also, re-encoding a DV file is not a good representation of what that codec can do. When you have a video that is already DV it's already lost a substantial amount of it's original quality. Encoding a DV file in some other codec means you've now accumulated the quality loss of *BOTH* codecs. In order to perform a meaningful comparison you have to compare encodings from originals that were never compressed to begin with.