what colorspace to select in Lagarith ?

[codemaster]

I'm using Sony Vegas 7d because I use a DVD camcorder, Canon DC100, and Vegas is the only editor I found that is able to import footage from camcorder DVD's, detecting where a clip begins and ends, and separating the clips in individual files, ALL without converting them to another format.

But after I finish editing, I want to use MeGUI to encode what I've edited. Specificaly, I want to encode the sound with Vorbis, the video with x264, and mux to mkv.

At first, I've exported a signpost avi with Vegas and DebugMode FrameServer in order to provide an intermediary between Vegas timeline and MeGUI. I didn't knew what colorspace to choose in DebugMode, so I left it at the default, wich is RGB24.

But because DebugMode FrameServer almost freezes my hdd and pc while serving frames, I don't want to use the frame serving solution anymore, as intermediary between Vegas and MeGUI.

As far as I know, the only solution to avoid frame serving, is to use a lossless codec, such as Lagarith or Huffyuv. So I will export the video in lagarith avi and audio in uncompressed wav as intermediaries.

But I have no clue what settings to use in Lagarith. It has these checkboxes: enable null frames, always suggest rgb for output, use multithreading, prevent upsampling when decoding. And a list box with these options: RGBA, RGB (Default), YUY2, YV12.

From what I understand so far about video editors, I think that Vegas converts the colorspace of the camcorder dvd's (wich is YUV 4:2:0 according to MediaInfo) to RGB. If this is true, this means I should export the intermediary with RGB colorspace ... in order to avoid another colorspace conversion and possibly some type of losses ?

And one last question. Are there any other codecs better than Lagarith that were designed for intermediary files ?

[jagabo]

Vegas' output will be RGB. You might as well keep it in RGB in Lagarith. If you need a little more compression use YUY2 or YV12 (h.264 normally uses YV12 so you won't be losing anything). If your video is interlaced be aware that you will lose the interlace flag in the Lagarith AVI. You'll have to tell the later editor/encoder the video is interlaced. I'm pretty sure that Lagarith assumes progressive when converting RGB to YV12 -- that will be a problem if your source is interlaced.

But you can probably get frameserving to work without hogging up the computer. Just use Task Manager to reduce the priority of the encoder (x264).