I've been using my GL2 to capture footage for a friend's video project. Over at his place, we transferred a cassette directly into his PC using Vegas and, by default, I guess, the clips were .avi files. (I don't use Vegas, so I'm unfamiliar with its importing options.)

Recently, I shot footage at a remote location and it wasn't practical to go back to his place and plug the camcorder into his Windows machine, so I transferred the files into my PowerBook using iMovie HD 6 and then copied the .dv clips onto a DVD and shipped it to him. He says that the .avi files are not only much larger than the .dv files but that the .avi footage is much sharper.

So, my questions:

1. Can iMovie import clips as .avi files? Or save/export them as such?

2. Is .avi a superior format to .dv?

3. Why is this a problem -- isn't .dv the native, original format my GL2 is capturing?

4. Is it possible that the .avi footage is being tweaked somehow in Vegas and that's why it looks better and that once the .dv footage is similarly tweaked it'll look the same?

I feel bad about giving this guy inferior footage, if that's what's happening. Any suggestions from you Vegas folks would be appreciated.

Leigh

AVIs are just wrappers; the codec is DV. It's the same info whether captured as .avi or .mov -- it's just a straight copy of 1s and 0s. DV is about 13 gigs per hour no matter what.

David,

Many thanks for the info. Any idea what could be causing my friend's perceived quality difference between the .avi files we transferred directly into his PC and the .dv files I copied onto a DVD for him?

Leigh

Did you burn it as a video DVD, or did you save the files as data? If you burned a video DVD, you sent him MPEG-2 files.

If you saved them as data and the the files aren't 13 gigs/hour, then you didn't send him DV files; you (or iMovie) used something else. MPEG-2? MPEG-4? Sorenson 3? H.264? All of these will be far more compressed than DV, will have smaller files, and the quality will be less.

David,

I didn't burn a video DVD. All I did was copy the .dv files onto a DVD. iMovie wasn't even running at the time -- and these are the only files that were transferred from the GL2. If the files haven't been modified and have a .dv extension, they're original .dv files, right?

Leigh

How big are the files, per hour?

I just checked -- an hour and seven second's worth of .dv files are 12.62 GB.

Well, that's about right -- I'd be wondering what the .avi files on the other end are, then, because if they're so much bigger, then they aren't DV.

I think he's using Vegas 4, if that helps. My friend has a great deal of experience as a graphic artist, but, like me, is a relative newcomer to NLE editing. I was there when he transferred the files over and I think he pretty much accepted whatever options were defaults.

Leigh

I think he's using Vegas 4, if that helps. My friend has a great deal of experience as a graphic artist, but, like me, is a relative newcomer to NLE editing. I was there when he transferred the files over and I think he pretty much accepted whatever options were defaults.

Leigh

All Vegas does is transfer the DV bit for bit and put it into an .avi wrapper. Seems like he must have done something else if his file sizes are bigger.