Codec for Video capture

[yousufkhan]

Dear FriendsI am new to video capturing I have just started my project
I wanted to do video capturing project which will capture/edit videos in a good quality
like mepg1, mpeg2 , AVI etc .
I need your advice for selecting the codec which is the best codec i should used
which will not give big size files but good quallity vides

[Hoser Rob]

While I'm not one of the capturing experts here by any means, what I'd do is capture to lossless ... which will be very large ... and then convert it to something of a more manageable size.

[smrpix]

The best capture is an exact duplicate of your original source -- simply copy it if you can. Hoser Rob's advice is certainly the highest quality way to handle material that must be converted.

[Richard_G]

mpeg1 and 2 are final formats, not editing formats. As said, you want something that doesn't compress at all but what you use will depend to a certain extent on what you are capturing from and how.

[PuzZLeR]

I'm assuming you're capturing from VHS?

Whatever you end up with, MPEG-1/2, DivX, Xvid, H.264, whatever highly compressed format, you're better off starting with a lossless capture.

Many formats were not designed for capture very well, only for compressed playback. Lossless formats, such as HuffYUV, UT, Lagarith, are much better suited for capture (and all comfortable in an AVI).

Yes, the file size will be considerably bigger with lossless, but it doesn't matter. After you finish the capture, you can edit, filter, process etc, and THEN convert it to another smaller sized format in the end.

The quality will always be better using capture->lossless->high compressed format, than directly from capture->high compressed format.

You're always better off starting with lossless when dealing with such analog source formats.