Quality loss in video?

[vid83]

In digital photography world, when JPG files are saved, the picture loses quality each time you save. To resolve this issue all pictures need to be converted from JPG to TIFF.
Is there anything similar in the video editing world?

Note: my original videos straight from my miniDV video camera and into premiere is .avi.

[guns1inger]

Huffyuv, Lagarith, MSU lossless and a host of other codecs provide lossless compression for video. The cost is much larger file sizes - 3 - 5 times the size of DV avi files.

However it depends on what you are doing as to how much quality you will lose. Premiere, when working with DV avi, is smart enough not to re-encode footage that you haven't changed, so if your edits are simple cuts there should be no quality loss.

[Soopafresh]

Think of AVI as an "envelope" where you can place your Audio and Video "letters"

Your Video can be encoded with DivX, Xvid, H264, etc - these all introduce loss when re-encoded. The ones that don't are Huffyuv, Lagarith, several others. Try Huffyuv or Lagarith, both are great.

[thecoalman]

Yea it's called DV-AVI... Well not exactly, DV-AVI is compressed but not nearly as much as MPEG. You can go through many generations without noticeable loss in quality. Be sure to make your edits and anything else you do as DV-AVI, also note that when you export as DV-AVi from a better editor like Premier it will only reencode the parts you have edited, so you will only be resaving the parts that have changed. At least it should. I really don't know that 100% as I don't use it. (edit: Gunslinger confirmed that's what it does above, he beat me to it. )

You should only convert DV-AVI to another format like MPEG once.

[Soopafresh]

guns1inger is quick on the draw

[guns1inger]

Just don't tell the ladies . . . . .

[vid83]

I have Premiere Pro 1.5. My videos are .avi.
I am currently editing videos by taking the .avi videos and dragging it into the timeline in a sequence. Each time I go to File > Save, is there any quality loss?

[thecoalman]

I'll give you example you can actually "see". You'll need to time each of these operations.

Go into My Computer, find a clip and copy it to another folder.

Open premeire put the same clip on the timeline and save it to a new file, should be about the same time as above.

Take the same clip and add 5 or 6 transitions through the clip, should be slighlty longer.
You may even hear your harddrive have less activity as it hits the points it has to encode.

Take that clip and adjust the brightness or any other filter to the entire clip, this considering your CPU will take quite a while to encode.

-----------

It's not a perfect solution, someone else will tell you what settings you need to change if any to make sure it's not being reencoded. What that will do is familairize you with what the approximate length of time it should be for clips you have only made minor edits too.