MPEG versus AVI

sdgates wrote on 8/4/2003, 8:42 AM
Somewhere on the Internet a while back I read that the best way to edit video is to do so in MPEG format. That would mean no transcoding when making a DVD and much less storage would be used on hard drives.

Is this viable with VideoFactory or VegasVideo?

Per JohhnyRoy's posting in the "I'm ready to upgrade. vegas or adobe premier?" thread [http://www.sonicfoundry.com/forums/ShowMessage.asp?MessageID=203554&Page=1] I looked up the current deals for VV at VideoGuys.com and see several VV+burner packages that look extremely interesting.

So now I am thinking - rather than blow $700 for a new home-brew computer, maybe I should spring for a VV bundle instead. But storage would still be a big problem because I am currently working on 4 projects that take up 80 GB of space. I currently don't have room for anything more! Thus my interest in editing in MPEG format.

So what was the deal with that posting (wherever it was) - is MPEG editing possible in VF or VV?

Thanks for your advice guys!

Comments

IanG wrote on 8/4/2003, 10:06 AM
It depends how you define "best", but if you're concerned about the quality of the finished product then MPEG is definitely NOT the way to go. If you just want to put a number of MPEG clips in order you should be OK, but do any real editing and the image quality will go down the toilet! That said, VF and Vegas can handle MPEG, it's just not recommended.

HDs are getting cheaper all the time, so maybe VF and a big disk or 2 would be an option?

Ian G.
Chienworks wrote on 8/4/2003, 10:34 AM
The other thing to keep in mind is that using MPEG files on the timeline is a *SLOW* process. If your video clips are even a few minutes long or longer, expect to spend many hours scrolling back and forth through the timeline. Rendering will also be quite a bit slower. If your time is valuable to you at all then it's probably cheaper to go buy a few 120GB drives to make room for .avi files instead.

As far as transcoding for DVD is concerned, unless your source files just happen to be DVD compliant, they'll probably be re-encoded anyway. For that matter, if you edit in VideoFactory or Vegas, the MPEG source files will be decompressed and then re-encoded whether they were compliant or not. Not much time or quality savings there.
JohnnyRoy wrote on 8/4/2003, 9:09 PM
I gotta agree with Ian and Kelly. If you said that the best way to archive your VHS tapes to DVD was to capture as MPEG2 to avoid encoding twice and take up less disk space, I would agree with you. But if you want to EDIT the footage, then the whole thing will need to be re-encoded and your best bet would be to capture and edit as AVI and then encode to MPEG2 to use on your DVD. As others have pointed out, editing MPEG is time consuming and you will loose more quality than editing AVI.

~jr
sdgates wrote on 8/4/2003, 11:55 PM
Thanks guys for the very helpful information! Quality is "job one" in my book, so I'll forget editing in MPEG and go back to "Plan A" - create a really nice, expandable disk array. I discovered a relatively cheap drive controller from LSI (at least when compared to SCSI controllers costing over a grand) that not only uses the new Serial ATA (SATA) drives, not only has 64 MB of cache implimented in ECC SDRAM, but it'll handle up to SIX SATA drives. If I start with 200 GB drives, I'll eventually end up with 1 terabyte of storage. (Generally speaking, one drives worth of storage ends up being used for parity - thus 1,000 GB rather than 1,200 GB available storage.)

(Click here for a listing.)

Thanks again for everybody's input!!!!
Chienworks wrote on 8/5/2003, 5:34 AM
A terabyte is enough space for over 75 hours of DV. That's a HUGE project you're working on!