Project rendering questions. Which format?

Cbrus wrote on 11/17/2007, 12:16 PM
Here in Ohio working on my project & watching the Ohio State vs Michigan Football game. It's cold and cloudy -- a perfect day for football & for video projects!

I have a quick question about rendering.
Not sure why I am so concerned about this, I am just paranoid about losing picture quality in my end product.

I want to make my project combining several smaller ones together to make an end project. Here is my workflow:

1) Create sub group 1 by adding pics & video with music. It will be a 5 minute section. Then I want to render it and set the rendered file aside.
2) Create sub group 2 by doing the same as above then set the rendered file aside.
3) After creating 5 sub group files I want to put all of the resulting rendered files together into one timeline and render that as the FINAL project and then send it to DVDA for burning.

Question is: Process above is 2 passes thru the render process plus what DVDA does to the file.
When I render subgroups should what is the BEST format to render to so that I keep loss of quality at a minimum? I know that the FINAL one will be rendered to mpeg. Should the sub groups also be rendered as mpeg or as something else that would involve less loss in quality? AVI?

Thanks. CB

Comments

Chienworks wrote on 11/17/2007, 1:25 PM
If you're doing SD (standard definition) video, which i assume you are since your target is to burn a DVD, then it's hard to beat SONY's own DV .avi codec. The loss is extremely minimal. On the other hand, since it looks like you're only dealing with something like 25 minutes' worth you could consider uncompressed AVI. 25 minutes will need about 45GB of hard drive space so keep that in mind. 25 minutes of DV will only be about 6GB.
Terry Esslinger wrote on 11/17/2007, 1:32 PM
If your boriginal footage is Dvavi does it really do any good to render an 'intermediate' stage to uncomprressed avi. It seems DVavi to DVavi loses very little. Are you going to see any noticeablre difference by going from uncompressed avi to mpeg2 (for DVD) when your original material was Dvavi? Seems like it would just use a loot more space and power.
Chienworks wrote on 11/17/2007, 1:38 PM
If the original footage is all DV then yes, sticking with DV for the intermediates makes sense. However, .... "adding pics & video" .... pictures will lose noticeable color detail when rendered to DV, and then they'll be compressed a different direction going to MPEG. So in that case the pictures would suffer two hits. True, the loss may be negligible, but it will still be there.

The same goes if you add a significant amount of titling, especially if it's in color, and most especially if it's got a lot of red. Sharp red details in DV are a disaster although the transfer to MPEG pretty well. There will be a huge difference in quality in this case between a DV intermediate and an uncompressed intermediate.