Is AVI Compressed?

[duraysteeus]

Hey All,

I'm sort of an intermediate video hobbyist using Vegas 6.0.

I'm wondering, when I render captured video from the timeline to AVI format, am I recompressing it? In other words, is converting and AVI file to another AVI file like converting WAV to WAV? (Lossless). I know that AVI files are really huge so that's why I wondered if they are compressed or not.

Part of why I want to know is becuase even with the bitrate calculator, I still don't have good luck trying to convert my projects to MPEG-2 for DVD Architect without Architect telling me my project is too big and needs to be recompressed. So I'm wondering if I save my projects as AVI and then let DVD Architect convert it to MPEG and fit it to disc if that's the right idea.

By the way, these movies are often right around 2 hours give or take - but no more.

-Dustin

[nwo]

No, once it's compressed on the cam the file is the same all the time! unless your use
a other codec and not DV-Avi.

[celtic_druid]

Well DV is not lossless.
Assuming Vegas does its job properly it won't recompress anything that doesn't need to be. Transitions, etc. will require recompression though and there is quality loss with DV. The rest should be just copied as is.

[ZippyP.]

AVI is a file type that can contain many different types of video and audio. Avi is usually compressed but may be uncompressed (unlikely). Without knowing the codec (coder-decoder) it's impossible to say.

[guns1inger]

DV is not lossless, however the Sony DV codec that Vegas uses is very good, and can withstand several generations before the damage becomes visible.

That said, Vegas also has a number of other tricks up it's sleeve to reduce the need to do intermediate DV saves. You can load projects onto the timeline as if they were DV clips, and work with them (edit, apply effects etc). I believe you can also load a project into DVD Architect instead of a clip (you might have to test this one).

However, if you put the correct numbers into the encoder, you will get the correct file size. Caveat - single pass variable bitrate is NOT accurate. Either use Constant BitRate or 2-pass Variable BitRate. Also, check your DVD Architect project settings. If they are set to LPCM you may be giving up a lot of space.

[duraysteeus]

Can you tell me more about working with projects in the timeline as if they were DV clips? Also, I didn't see anything in DVD architect about loading projects from Vegas.

How do you (personally) go about rendering your projects to be ready for DVD Architect? My issue is that I'm willing to work with the 2 hour limit of 4.7GB DVDs. However, I keep having DVD Architect telling me my project is too big and needs to be recompressed. I am confused about that error message because I've been preparing my movies as MPEG-2 with Ac3 audio and my projects are usually about 1 1/2 to 2 hours long (never a minute over 2 hours).

I want to be able to render my movie only once - so that I don't lose quality when I go to burn a DVD. So my work around thus far has been to render my projects in Vegas as AVI, import the AVI into DVD architect and then let DVD architect render my movie from AVI to an MPEG-2 file that will fit to disc. It takes a long time to have it render twice, but at least I know it will fit to disc.

That all being said, the end result quality looks just fine. However, I really want to make sure I'm optimizing my movies so that they can be as high quality as possible. And - so that I'm optimizing my rendering times and not having to do more rendering than necessary.

I thank everyone for their help!

-Dustin