I have been debating with a buddy of mine about loss of quality of digital video footage. He claims that everytime you take footage on the computer, cut the footage down and re-save it as a quicktime movie, it recompresses the footage resulting in loss of quality. He thinks that exporting it back onto tape then bringing it back into Final Cut would be a lossless method of doing the same thing. I disagree with that.

Maybe you do lose some quality by resaving files from hard drive to hard drive on the computer but I sure haven't seen any loss of detail. Isn't data on a computer data? Or does saving files over again in Final Cut really recompress footage that has already been compressed once on importing? Anyone else want to shed some light on the subject?

Capture from a DV tape into FCP at DV/NTSC...no loss of quality. Output that same footage back to a camera...no loss of quality. ABSOLUTELY NONE! All it is is a data transfer...1's and 0's.

If you export a Final Cut Pro MOVIE (not QT COMPRESSION), self contained using sequence settings, there is NO LOSS of quality. Copy that to a hard drive, then from that hard drive to another...and then to another, and another and another...NO LOSS OF QUALITY.

It is all a simple data transfer.

In the timeline, FCP only recompresses your footage when you render an effect, and it processes most of its effects in Y'CbCr color space so this is the best-case scenario for retaining quality. Shane said everything else you need to know.

Thanks for the input, I appreciate it.