Good codec for remote collaboration?

fongaboo wrote on 11/6/2002, 1:07 PM

I want to collaborate with someone remotely via Broadband internet connections.. The footage being worked with is natively DV (AVI's).

The way I plan to do this is have the other person do a rough cut of a scene, save the project file and a copy of the referenced clips in a directory. Then I will have them use BatchConverter to compress the clips to something of a size that is broadband friendly. Then I will have them upload the project and the compressed clips to an FTP server where I will download them. I will make finer cuts and then upload a completed project file. At which point they can take the updated project file and have it reference the fullsize clips.

But what is a good codec to use for this purpose? Any suggestions?

Comments

dcrandall wrote on 11/6/2002, 1:20 PM

Wouldn't it be easier if you both had a copy of the original DV-AVI file? That way your changes can be sent via a small ".veg" file.

fongaboo wrote on 11/6/2002, 1:25 PM

The ultimate project involves about 30 hours of shot DV footage.. That works out to be between 500-600 gigs. I don't own that much space myself. The shooter would be making a rough cut of a single scene and then upload the files involved. But DV-AVIs are gonna be too big for broadband.

dcrandall wrote on 11/6/2002, 1:40 PM

Wow, 30 hours worth of video....OK, forget my first suggestion. However, I still feel the low-tech solution may be the best one. Any format other than DV-AVI is going to introduce a loss of quality. You still may be better off rendering the rough cut video back to tape and sending the tape. (I'm assuming that the rough cut will reduce the project to a much more manageable size?)

fongaboo wrote on 11/6/2002, 2:13 PM

Quality is not an issue.. The compressed clips will only get used by me. The shooter will get back from me the updated project file ONLY and then play it while referencing the respective uncompressed clips.

Maybe I should step-by-step it a little better:

1) Shooter lays out a rough cut of one scene of what will ultimately be a bigger project. They create the rough cut while working with the original uncompressed DV clips. They save this rough one scene as it's own project file in a completely different directory (we'll call this the staging directory) using the option to copy all referenced clips to that directory.

So that leaves us with a staging directory containing a project file and only the DV-AVIs that are referenced by that scene.

2) Shooter runs Batch Converter on the staging directory and converts those copies of the AVIs to much smaller ones using the ______ codec. It preserves the same filenames of the clips.

3) Shooter uploads contents of the staging directory (project file and compressed clips) to the FTP site

4) Shooter deletes the contents of the staging directory.

5) I do a finer edit working with these compressed clips and save an updated project file.

6) I upload the updated project file ONLY.. No clips.

7) I delete my copy of the compressed clips.

8) Shooter receives updated project file and places it, *NOT* in the staging directory which is now empty, but in the original directory that contained the original copies of the uncompressed DV clips.

9) Shooter opens the updated project file in Vegas. Vegas may question where the clips are, but once it sees that there is an AVI with the same name (same clip but uncompressed) it will follow suit and load them all with all the edit decisions I have made.

So I guess I have already decided on the method.. I am only looking for suggestions for a codec that is reasonably small enough to do uploads in broadband and fast enough to reasonably compress on a 1Ghz machine.

Chienworks wrote on 11/6/2002, 3:39 PM

I'm gonna suggest WMV. At the higher bitrates you get a good enough image to see what you're doing and Vegas seems to handle them pretty well. You may want to convert them back to DV files once you get them on your computer just so that manipulating the timeline goes faster.