If your original video is from a DV camera, there is no advantage to going to uncompressed first. The video is already compressed by the camera. Go straight to MPEG.

Dave T2

No matter what format the original is, there is no benefit to an intermediate render ... unless you want that intermediate format for some other reason. Even then, the intermediate file probably will be no help in the final process.

One situation i'll find myself in often is that i want several compressed formats from the project: DV for printing to tape, MPEG-2 for DVD, MPEG-1 for VCD, WMV at 3Mbps for CD delivery, WMV at 256Kbps for web delivery, etc. If the project has more than a trivial amount of effects, crossfades, titles, filters, etc. then all these things will have to be rendered every time i make a new output file. In this case i'll do the render to DV-AVI first, get all the effects & such out of the way once, then use this AVI file to produce all the more compressed versions. This speeds up the rendering process substantially. However, i do realize that i may be taking a quality hit by compressing to DV first and then from there going to other formats.

On the other hand, if the only output format required is, say, MPEG-2 for DVD, it will take more time to render to AVI first and then to MPEG-2. You may also lose some quality in titles, effects, composits, etc. that you would retain if you go straight to MPEG-2 first.

Thanks guys. I want to clarify a thing or two:

The project is a mixture of jpg files, mpeg, avi and wmv (that windows movie format) and music files. Liberal use of fades and such with minimal use of effects. So after I had assembled all these various elements, then I would render ("make movie" to an AVI file not using any template, and after that was finished I'd take that AVI file and render "make movie" again" to an mpeg2 file for burning to DVD.

I was told that creating the first file (AVI) is good because there is no compressing therefore when you go to compress it nothing will get lost in the compression (final mpeg2 file) so to speak.

So, I should skip the first step of rendering to an AVI file and simply render straight to mpeg2?

Chris

Skip it.

You don't need the intermediate render.

Dave T2

Thanks again!

Chris

Well, what you have on the timeline is basically uncompressed while it's being rendered. So, you can render from that to MPEG-2 or render to uncompressed AVI and then to MPEG-2. You'll get exactly the same result, but the two-step render will take longer and eat up hard drive space for no purpose.

There will be a lot of compression when you render to MPEG-2 because MPEG-2 is a highly compressed format. This will happen no matter what format you start with.