Hello..

Im looking to do something that might be transfered to 35mm later down the line.

Some of which is live action and Im shooting with my XL1. What compressor
is the best to use if any. Im using MicrosoftDV compressor for DVD and Beta transfers but havent done anything for film.

anyone have any input on their prefered compressor.

There are two choices here:

a) leave it in the format you got it (ie DV encoded)
b) uncompressed (or lossless compressed)

anything else will degrade the image too much (in my opinion).

The question you've gotta ask is on what format they want
the movie delivered (harddisk, DVD, betacam etc.). Just edit
your movie first and polish it. Be ready to make multiple outputs
of it.

Good luck

Thanks...

The main concern is which compressor will effect the picture quality the least.
Microsoft DV seems to handle this ok.

To capture the video uncompressed will take up too much memory and
hard disk space for me to work with...though i would like too anyway.

I have had extremely good success with compression to either MPEG2 or MPEG4 compression schemes, but, only with bitrates over 2500 KBPS. I always output my POST to DV.avi, then transcode via TMPGENc or DiVX5.02. TMPGENc has proven its quality for MPEG2(SVCD) conversions and my experiments with VirtualDub and the DIVX5.02 codec have been quite good, as well. TMPGENc with the appropriate front end plug in will read MPEG2 video streams and perform a 3:2 pulldown if you want to got o film, later. I only know this capability exists, I can't attest to the quality of the transfer.

I always archive the DV.avi file as my master, because it's the most flexible for future editting.

Hope this answers your question.