Edius - arguably the most AVC friendly NLE out there right now, especially Edius Neo 2.5 (with the booster thingy that makes dropping AVCHD right onto the timeline work pretty smoothly, so long as you have a least a modest quad core CPU).

I was able to create an ISO image (picked Blu-ray) using Vegas 9, then burned it to a DVD on my Linux machine, not sure how to burn ISOs on XP. Played fine in my Sony BD player. This was at 12Mbps (I thought it was 17). I'll have to try 17Mbps.

Cineform isn't anywhere near lossless. What it gives is something kind of the same idea as DV for HD... no intraframe compression (eg, like DV, but unlike MPEG-2 or AVC, every frame is independent of one another). It's much faster for editing purposes. Also much larger... HDV and DV run about 12GB per hour, while Cineform for 1080/60i HD content is usually over 50GB per hour. But do the math... that's compressed.

Cineform is, in fact, is based on a set of mathematics called wavelets, which is a fundamentally different compression technology than DV, JPEG, MPEG-2, and AVC, all of which are based on use of the discrete cosine transform. Not too important to know the gory details (I do, but I'm not trying to write a book here), just note that because wavelet is different than DCT, the kind of compression artifacts you'll see (or not see... these are pretty high quality CODECs) are different.

There are some free technologies that do the same kind of thing as Cineform. The first, available today, is the Avid DNxHD CODEC. You can get this free for Windows (under Quicktime) on the Avid website. But the good news here is that this has been accepted as a standard, it's now SMPTE VC-3. Like Cineform, this has been designed to much lower in CPU use than MPEG-2 or AVC, but also to withstand repeated encoding and decoding without much damage, which is critical when you're doing heavy editing on video. I believe DNxHD is based on DCT, but it's new, and from a high end company like Avid, fairly trustworthy.

Another standard in this space, though not quite ready yet, is Dirac Pro, which was invented by the BBC in England. This is very much like Cineform, based on wavelets. The Dirac format was created by the BBC with the idea that they, as well as the world, needed a video format for archival that was very high quality and not dependent on any patents or proprietary technology. It's too early to know just how fast this will be for editing, as it's kind of experimental at the moment. But it's coming... and the family of Dirac technologies was accepted by SMPTE as VC-2, so this is another open source industry standard.

That seems to be the case. You can actually get somewhere around 20Mb/s from the Main Concept AVC CODEC in Vegas. But the Sony encoder seems to be fixed at 17Mb/s. That may be based on the specific profile they're supporting. AVC is a huge thing, and there are all kinds of different levels and profile specifications that mandate just which of the big set of magic tricks you can use, the maximum video formats (I have trouble with Vegas on 1080/60p video in MP4/AVC from one camcorder... could just be bugs, but there's definitely an issue here), etc.

You can buy Neo Scene from Videoguys for about $100, as I did. But there's a big problem with their activation procedure.. I'm basically locked out of using Cineform, even after buying it, and their tech support people have not solved the problem.

If it's just editing speed, try DNxHD if you're doing pro-level stuff, it may solve the problem. Otherwise, you can render out AVC in one of the higher end Sony MXF formats with virtually no loss. These use MPEG-2 at very high quality (better than HDV), and that's actually included with Vegas. The main issue there might be repeated layered edits.. I don't know if MXF/MPEG-2 would hold up as well as Cineform or DNxHD. But if it's just to get faster edits, try the MXF... it's built-in.

Thanks for correcting me. I made the wrong assumption about Cineform.

Heck, if you want a free intermediate codec, XVID can be configured to actually work quite well (limited to 8 bit 4:2:0 though). I did some testing with XVID (configured to use intraframe only compression) vs Canopus HQ and while Canopus HQ was a little faster, XVID was not exactly what I would call slow and yielded notably better SSIM scores and at slightly lower bitrates to boot (with some footage I shot of my puppy).

Any comments on preview frame rates with these codecs?

I tried DNxHD several months ago, with poor timeline performance, which I attributed to the QT wrapper. Not sure if this was a fair assessment. This was on something like a 2.6GHz Core2 Duo.

Right or wrong, I'm thinking we need Direct-X or AVI or something other than a QT wrapper to get good performance on the timeline.

Comments?

Avid's DNxHD is an excellent codec. But it is not wavelet like Cineform. It is DCT (Discrete Cosine Waveform) much like Apple's ProRes or CanopusHQ though it preceeded both of them. You are correct that there are free Wavelet based compression codecs. Jpeg2000 and Motion Jpeg2000 aka MJ2K is one of them. Dirac, as you mention later is another. DNxHD is hardly new. It's over 6 years old at this point.

The idea of Dirac has some appeal, but as you say it's not quite ready. For someone who wants the Wavelet technoloigy now, Cineform and MJ2K are really the only games in town. I use MJ2K for archiving purposes now. Sony Vegas has a free implementation in the .MOV container, and Morgan Multimedia has a nice implementation in the .AVI container but that implementation costs $30. It was well worth it to me as it offers excellent control over all parameters.


MXF/Mpeg-2 will most certainly not hold up as well as Cineform or DNxHD, and neither of those is 10bit some DNxHD and Cineform also hold an advantage with available color and luminance space. But all of these are miles better than HDV. In the MXF container, the HD 422 is a 50Mbps Mpeg2 variant that is intraframe. It's probably the best option if an 8-bit, slightly lossy codec can be used. I've used it for web-based stuff and it's just fine for that.

Greatly dependent on the NLE. For NLEs that call Quicktime to handle .MOV (Vegas is one of these) the timeline performance of DNxHD or any other codec in the .MOV container is going to be rather poor. This is irrespective of what CPU you have. It's just a software limitation. In applications that can process .MOV files without an outside call, then DNxHD performance should be rather good.

One of the reasons I wanted to move to MJ2K was to get an AVI container with a wavelet inside. Much like Cineform, but without the cost or having to have proprietary software to read and write the codec.

I'm doing okay in 9c, no stuttering just yet. Still playing with it though. i7 920/Vista, 1080p footage in a 720p timeline. Perrone has reported some stuttering in the past though.

Its amazing to see the knowledge floating around in here, I love it.
So, uhm, could one of you rocket scientists answer me this? LOL.
Would any of these codecs you speak of give me any better "bang for my buck" (quality for file size) than Lagorith?
And is there anything wrong with Lagorith? A bit surprised it hasnt been mentioned.

I've never used Lagorith, but unless I'm mistaken it's a lossless codec, which means there there's no loss of quality at all from encoding, but file sizes will be larger than can be achieved with "lossy method" compression.

For "visually lossless" encoding of 4:2:0 source footage, that is really quite flexible (either optimizing for speed or for file size*), it would be difficult to beat XVID for the price (free).

*XVID can be configured so that quantization never exceeds "1" even if using interframe compression with P and B frames, so in addition to being capable of configuration for very high quality (and quite fast) I frame only compression, the same image quality can be achieved with significantly smaller file sizes too (but performance is slower).

MSU has a lossless codec (also free), which I believe is the best available for achieving the smallest file sizes without any loss of image quality. It's dang slow though.

several years ago I used MSU often for some SD projects. Indeed it is slow - I rendered overnight. However, I never use it now. As I recall, I started having trouble with crashes - perhaps because I was moving from SD to HD

I've been using lagarith for years. It has it's place. But it's not at it's best on the editing timeline. I use it as a lossless traveling codec from my NLE to Virtualdub and back. I don't want generational loss in that move.