Lagarith for editing vs. playback

Osotosail wrote on 11/1/2008, 1:37 PM

Reading about Huffyuv and Lararith on this forum I've research some and found info on wiki. I have a basic question as to the difference between the goals of editing video and delivering it for viewing by others.

1. If I use Lagarith (which according to wiki is good for editing) does that mean viewers of my work would need to have Lagarith installed on their PCs? I would like the widest variety of users to be able to view my work.

2. If my distribution is through YouTube, doesn't YouTube convert all format to .flv and wouldn't they be the ones to make the work viewable by all?

3. Do people here recommend preconverting to .flv (perhaps with better fidelity) prior to uploading to YouTube, if such a thing is done?

Comments

Eugenia wrote on 11/1/2008, 4:32 PM

You need to understand the difference between intermediate and delivery codecs. Lagarith/Huffyuv/Cineform are intermediate codecs, not delivery ones. Therefore, they are NOT suitable to send to friends or youtube. They are only good for editing, editing exchanging between collegues, and archiving. Read here for more:
http://eugenia.gnomefiles.org/2007/10/19/understanding-intermediate-and-delivery-video-formats/
http://eugenia.gnomefiles.org/2008/09/15/intermediate-codecs-the-face-off/

To export to youtube you need to export in WMV or MP4.

Osotosail wrote on 11/1/2008, 9:07 PM

Thanks for the references. Looks like Huffyuv might be better.

What is the workflow that I should be using in order to edit with the intermediate and deliver under .mp4 or .wmv?

"Render As" enables me to specify a particular codec on the "Video" tab of "Custom Template" - so should I assume the best codec is automatically chosen when selecting .mp4 or .wmv if the work is destined for YouTube?

Also, for content coming from my camcorder, or computer generated content, how are they put into the intermediate format? Is the answer to first load all content, then "Render As" Custom selecting (for example) Huffyuv, then loading the result for further editing in VMS? What about single frames, or sequence of frames?

Thanks again for your website.

Eugenia wrote on 11/1/2008, 9:27 PM

If you have normal video, there is no reason to render to an intermdediate codec. You just edit it as is. If you have sequences of images that you want to transform into scenes, you either "group" them, or you indeed, export in Huffyuv under the custom AVI template. Now, for resolution, frame rate etc, you have to fill the right values yourself.

For youtube content, you just export using the iPod VGA 640x480 mpeg4 template.

Osotosail wrote on 11/3/2008, 2:29 PM

Maybe I'm not understanding what "normal video" is, but I thought from reading the pages on your site that an intermediate format was desirable for editing.

The sequence of images would be a series of jpeg files from a drawing/rendering app, which doesn't have the option of using Huffyuv with AVI.

I may not have provided enough info on the image sequence. While one goal would be to have an image still work as the scene, perhaps scrolling across the image, this seems fairly straightforward in VMS - at least without the scrolling. The other goal, which I'm not sure about, would be using many jpeg images that were sequentially numbered by this other app to form the basis of the video. I've been able to do it, but I have no understanding what codec was used, or if none is applicable because it is only images.

Eugenia wrote on 11/3/2008, 2:46 PM

By "normal video" I mean video from consumer camcorders. Your case is different, as it is about sequential images. In that case, sure, you can export in Huffyuv before you actually edit it, or you can just edit as-is in the timeline with the individual images. Your choice.