Lossless codec for both Mac and PC?

[Tony Tibbetts]

Is there a virtually lossless codec that will work on both the mac and pc?

I plan on doing my editing in final cut pro and then drop the scenes exported into my pc for sound design and possible CC.

I was wondering if there is a cross platform codec that works well? I'm working in standard DV and I know it can be tricky keeping the image from degrading.

[Les Wilson]

The DV CODEC for the video is probably a good choice. It is common across the platforms. What is different is the file format inwhich the audio and the video are placed. Mac is .mov or .dv and PC is .AVI. Converting file formats should not recompress or alter either the audio or video data. An easy experiment is to export from FCP to a QuickTime file but uncheck the "make standalone" or whatever it says (my edit suite is without power courtesy of Wilma with lots of help from FPL). THe resulting file is called a reference file because it does not actually contain the footage but rather "refers" to it. Then open the reference file in the QuickTime Pro Player and export it to an AVI file specifying the following for video and audio options:
DV/DVCPRO 29.97FPS
48KHz 16 bit Stereo

[Tony Tibbetts]

Thanks. That sounds interesting.

[Stephen Schleicher]

while the dv codec is good if you are working with DV footage, the Animation codec is uncompressed. Export a QT movie in Animation codec will work on the PC too.

Cheers

[Graeme Nattress]

You can get the BMD uncompressed codecs for both platforms. I think PhotoJPEG is also available on the PC, and at 75% that's excellent. You could also look at the commerical BitJazz codec, which is excellent for this purpose.

Graeme