Is zipping .avi files bad?

[Therese Kim]

I didn't stripe my mini-DV tapes when i got footage. Now I have several tapes with useless timecode.

Now I'm trying to archive my Premiere project and associated .avi files. I zipped the .avi files to make them fit on a DVD. Thinking I archived my project, I deleted the original captured clips off my hard drive that my Premiere project refers to.

But I heard my professor say that for some reason, this is a bad thing -- that zipping .avi files makes them unusable.

Is this always true?

And if I were to re-create the project from my original DV tapes, is there a way to step around my huge mistake of not striping the tapes -- and archiving the project and associated clips as data files onto DVD?

Thanks!

[Michael Martens]

Archiving programs like Winzip use a lossless compression algorithimn so they should not cause any damage or loss of quality to .AVI files. You probably won't gain any additional space though by zipping your files because DV encoded AVI files are already compressed to begin with.

Its the same as zipping up Jpegs. You can't squeeze a compressed file any tighter so all Winzip will do is to store the file in an uncompressed state inside the .ZIP file. This is handy if you have several files you want to bundle together for storage or transport, but it won't save you any space.

Michael

[Rob Lohman]

Don't forget to include your project files as well...