compressed or uncompressed?
 

Hi all,

Been maping out my dedicated NLE system. I was on the Avid web page and saw the Mojo, and I just wanted to know if there were any advantages in editing in uncompressed form or not? I will be filming in DV with for now a GL2, but who knows in the future. Is there any adavantage to having the ability to doing this?

Thanks for all the help

Jeff

As you probably know if you are shooting in DV you are editing compressed whether you like it or not beause the camera compresses the vidoe 5:1.

The Avid Mojo looks really interesting, at least to me, for its RT editing capabilities. The ability to edit uncompressed is sort of a nice to have but unless you are shooting uncompressed it is not a feature that offers you much right away.

I may have all this screwed up though. Reading the Avid web site they say:

"Scalable from DV to uncompressed SD video - with DV, composite, and S-video - Avid Xpress Pro with Avid Mojo extraordinary picture and sound quality all over a standard FireWire connection."

I thought a "standard" Firewire connection was DV25. I'm not sure what happens to the rest of the bandwirdth between the SD input and the firewire cable. If there is anyone smarter than I, and that doesn't narrow it down too much, who can explain this to me I would appreciate it.

My general rule in buying hardware is to buy exactly what you need today. When you need something else the technology will have change, the prices will have dropped and/or the feature set will have improved.

All that being said, if you are in the market for a very interesting NLE, the Avid Express Pro with the Mojo looks like a very attractive package.

Firewire is not a DV25 only interface, it can go way higher than that, the firewire has 400Mbit as maximum, while DV25 only uses 36Mbit = 3.6MByte/s if my calculations are correct. I think that the only benefit of going uncompressed for DV is if you add special effects, titles and chroma key, since it works in 4.2.2 color space and not 4.1.1, uncompressed can also handle higher resolutions from 3D software and such.

Another thing to consider when you go uncompressed is that it's 25MBytes/s so you need a minimum of a 2 HDD Raid system to be able to do a regular 2 track video with a cross dissolve.

Jeff, if you can afford it, go for it, even if you are only going to use it for DV. I'ts always nice to edit in realtime. Who knows maybe you want to do some cool special effects in the future, then you are already set.

Uncompressed has advantages when you need to work with
several generations. Adding effects, 3d work, post work etc...