avi codecs
 

I am trying to save space on a project i am working on for fun and i need some help. I have a bunch of clips that i would like to use that are encoded with divx. When i import them into premier they preview fine but once i put them on the timeline no video shows up at all. in the past i just used vegas for similar projects but i have no desire for that this time. The reason i want to encode it is because i am going to be recieving some of the clips over the internet which would make it a very slow process if i did it with unencoded avi files. so my questions are:
1. is there any way to get divx to work correctly with 1.5.
2. if not what codec can i use to encode my files that will be no hassle to edit with in premier 1.5

MPEG-2 is the best lossy codec to archive in, as it is so widely supported. Indeed, many applications can edit it natively.

i might consider that but im really looking for a codec for avi files. from my experience other file types besides the native one for the program take a long time to import and then you have to re render it later. Plus mpeg 2 is still a little larger than what the avrage avi codec gets it down to i believe. unless i have no idea what im talking about which is possible.

For decent quality (but largish files) a mjpeg codec like PicVideo or MorganMultiMedia works well.

Xvid is arguably better than DivX (Doom9 did a codec shoot-out recently) ... and ran fine for me on PPro1.5.

You might take the clips you receive via the net (or DivX files you already have saved), and convert them to DV for editing purposes.

I also prefer using Xvid to DivX.

so i did try using xvid which did not work. but i had read on another forum some thing about changing the "fourcc" to DIVX instead of xvid. i dont know exactly what this does, im still encoding it with xvid but it seems to work. i dont know why having it on divx would work while no divx files work for me at all.

I have another question though, for these files i have to render them inorder to watch them smoothly. is this because they are compressed avi files? because i know i dont have to render normal avi files. does this happen with every codec?

Playback of DV-codec or M-JPEG codec should be smooth a silk on any system ... playback of xvid, divx, wmv etc will be a bit more dependent on your processor's grunt