Capturing and converting to AVI...
 

If I were to capture my XL1s footage to Premiere Pro, is it beneficial to convert to uncompressed AVI or should I just leave it as DV AVI? I will be doing some color correcting to the footage but not much more effects than that. I am concerned about quality loss as I edit through the footage. I would like to maintain what resolution I have in my original.

First with Premiere you already capture in AVI so you can at most
convert it into another codec.

The question you have is to whether you should go uncompressed.

This rarely is needed. In what program are you going to do these
color corrections? In Premiere? If so then you really don't need it.
Why? Because if you convert the DV AVI file to Uncompressed AVI
you will NOT ADD ANY NEW information! So the end data
is one on one the same as a realtime decompressed DV file.

So if you stay in Premiere it will work on exactly the same source
material. The reason to use uncompressed is if you render out
multiple layers or use different programs for a task. Then after
you are done cutting your movie you can export to uncompressed
and load this up in for example After Effects for final processing.

This will save you a generational loss. But, I must add that with
the current crop of DV codecs it will be hard to see any loss in
the first couple of generations. Would you want to keep as much
information as possible? Probably, but it takes massive amounts
of diskspace which may not warrant the purchase of additional
harddrives versus quality lost for example.

Bottomline: if you stay within Premiere just stick with DV, it's fine.
If you go out to other programs you may want to go uncompressed
but it may not be needed.

Hi Rob,
thanks so much for your reply. I will work it out through the standard DV AVI. If we need anything in After Effects, then I will convert. This is our very first short, so we are excited to get it all finished.

Sounds good and that's what you should be focussed on as well,
definitely since it is your first! Get it out there as good as you can,
content is king!

Worry about technical things later (when you are doing your
first piece of work). There is lots to be learned anyway!