Compression question
 

If this has been posted before please let me know where it is...I just need to know what's the best loosless compression software in Premiere and After Effects. After I worked really hard in a couple of projects I Noticed that the quality wasn't the same as my original video. To capture I used Microsoft DV AVI. I then would export this to an AVI using Microsoft DV AVI "again". The fianl result was horrible! Is there a great difference between Premiere's Microsoft DV AVI-Microsoft AVI-QuickTime; After Effects's Microsoft AVI-Animation and Uncompressed ?

Thanks

Huffyuv and animation are lossless codecs.

There are some out there that compress slightly better, but animation should work very well for you. In AE, set lower field first since that corresponds to what DV footage is.

2- The DV codec may screw up computer generated elements. It does not like super contrasty edges like computer generated text with no antialiasing. If going to DV tape, DV compression will be applied to your footage.

I did run into issues with the computer generated elements that wern't anti-alliased properly. Well, I learned.... Let's say I'm working in Premiere and I need to do some Touches in AF. I should export in Animation then from AF export it back to Animation?. Let say I do this several times how much of the quality would go down? Does anybody exports Uncompressed?

Lossless means that there is no generation loss from importing, making changes, and (re-)exporting.

I haven't tried myself, but it should be true. If you can't spot anything wrong with footage that has been through several generations then don't worry about it.

2- I believe you're better off working lossless and your hard drive will have trouble keeping up with uncompressed footage. Uncompressed video is huge (very roughly 65GB/hour) and requires about 18MB/s in sustained throughput from your hard drive (as a rule of thumb, your hard drive would need to spec 54MB/s sustained to prevent dropped frames). These are very rough numbers.

the only time that the hard drive thruput would be a showstopper is when you wanted to play the animation back in real time... fortunately ae can do previews in small, draft-mode windows that should allow you to work in uncompressed mode... but it'll be slow to render and slow to work with, probably only feasible with a short project.

you might also experiment with a slight blur to make the animated edges less of a compression problem... but every time that you re-compress it going from premiere(dv) to ae(uncompressed) and back again, you'll lose quality... you'd have to do all your editing with the codecs glenn suggested to avoid that.

Thank you guys, I did learn my lesson by not using the right compression before and that will not happend again. I just tried the Animation codec and it worked great. It did take long to render and created a bigger file, but at least it retained the quality. Uncompress would not work for me since I have limited HD. Just out of curiosity what compression do the "big boys" use in their fancy studios?

I always convert my footage to Targa sequences as soon as it's captured. Takes a serious hard drive, but the result is worth it.