Preserving color format...

VS wrote on 5/23/2002, 10:48 AM
I have a DV camcorder (Canon XL1S) and interested in transferring DV to my PC which has a 120GB dedicated hard drive for video transfer. Since I got 120GB of free space, I'm thinking of capturing DV with no compression.
If I use HuffYUV 2.1.1/no compression selected, will I get a DV AVI file with no compression involved?
Will there be any compression during capture?

Also, I'm hearing that most of the NLE software for Windows converts to RGB color format during the rendering process (after adding transistions, filters etc) which I don't want to. Is there a way to overcome this color conversion?

My aim is to have a uncompressed AVI file which includes all the transisitions/filters after the rendering process is done.

Does Vegas Video 3 does this or is there any NLE for Windows that doesn't do the color conversion?

I'm planning to buy a NLE for Windows which preserves the color format in all steps.

Comments

SonyEPM wrote on 5/23/2002, 11:11 AM
"I have a DV camcorder (Canon XL1S) and interested in transferring DV to my PC which has a 120GB dedicated hard drive for video transfer. Since I got 120GB of free space, I'm thinking of capturing DV with no compression. If I use HuffYUV 2.1.1/no compression selected, will I get a DV AVI file with no compression involved? Will there be any compression during capture?"

The compression is done by the camera when you record to the DV format and there is no avoiding that. When you transfer DV to the computer over 1394, there is NO additional compression- it is a bit-for-bit file copy. Decompressing the DV from the camera to analog and then feeding it to some capture card and encoding uncompressed with Huffy or anything else is a step backwards- worse than neutral. File size will also expand dramtically.

"Also, I'm hearing that most of the NLE software for Windows converts to RGB color format during the rendering process (after adding transistions, filters etc) which I don't want to. Is there a way to overcome this color conversion?"

Different apps handle color space conversions differently, but there is a difference between how it looks on paper and how it looks on a TV monitor. You should be pretty happy with the quality of your Vegas renders if you capture the DV over 1394 and then render back to DV with the SF DV codec, and send that back to the DV camera over 1394.

"My aim is to have a uncompressed AVI file which includes all the transisitions/filters after the rendering process is done."

Are you going back out to DV eventually? If so forget about uncompressed- DV is a compressed format. Check it out- capture a few DV clips over 1394, add some transitions, a title, some effects, print that back to DV over 1394- it'll look great.

If you really want to render as uncompressed you can do that (to export to another app for instance) but you'll never get it out to a tape format if there's no codec involved.

Also: Vegas decompresses the frames, does any needed processing, and then feeds the various built-in encoders uncompressed frames. There is no interim compression step back to DV or anything else.