noob question...about VIRTUALDUB....

[SeeNoEVO]

hows it going guys....I actually have two questions if someone can help, that be great. I am using SONY VEGAS 7 to edit some videos and the quality is not that good because I had to convert from AVI to WMV for VEGAS to accept my videos. However, when I converted through VIRTUALDUB from AVI to AVI again with better quality, VEGAS accepts it. First question:

1. Is it better to compress it beforehand and edit the videos in VEGAS, and save it through VEGAS without losing quality or is better to leave the videos in WMV, edit it and have VEGAS save it in AVI with some quality lost, and then compress it through VIRTUALDUB for better quality?

Second problem I have is that when I converted one of my videos in VIRTUALDUB, the frames on the output was slow, but it didnt lose quality. I searched around this forum and found steps to do it. I installed VIRTUALDUB, then installed LAGARITH, opened the video file and select LAGARITH in the "compression", but the output video LAGGED. Second question:

2. Did I do anything wrong, or need any filters, codecs, etc.?

Thanks guys, I apologize for the long text. I wanted to be specific.

[redwudz]

Generally, editing should be done at the most basic level, IE, the original video. Every time you re-encode, you will have quality loss. You can minimize the loss by using a higher bitrate. But higher bitrate=Larger files.

I'm not sure of your original format, but if Vegas won't accept it, you might try a different editor. If you really have to edit in a different format, convert the video to a format that has low loss/compresion, like HuffyUV, or DV AVI or Lagarith.

The fewer times you re-encode, the better. And the higher the bitrate you use and the larger the file size will usually help to preserve the quality.

If you are getting sync loss, try to find out where it happened. Too many conversions, or a corrupted file can cause that. Or bad cuts and joins.

Some highly compressed formats like Xvid and similar are poor candidates for editing. The keyframes by default with Xvid are 300 frames apart. This makes frame accurate editing all but impossible without re-encoding. Low loss codecs like DV, HuffyUV or Lagarith should help here.

It comes down to, the less conversions or encodes you do, the better.

And welcome to our forums.