Lossless Video Compression for Movie Making

[Sparehead01]

Hi,

I need some advice on what codec might be suitable to solve my problem which is this.

I have large amounts of footage created using 3ds MAX & After Effects. The footage is generally in PNG format (1280 x 720) in a sequence of individual stills. The problem is..when I import the footage into Vegas or Premiere the software (and my PC) just grinds to a complete halt. I have 4GB RAM (using the 3GB switch in XP) & 3ghz dual core.

Whilst I can import the equivalent footage in AVI or MOV format without any problem the quality of the finished render suffers and just doesn't appear the same as a render from an image sequence.

So does anyone have any ideas on what format I can convert the iamge sequences to so that I don't lose quality. I want to keep the same resolution and the quality that I have already but convert the footage for editing and future conversion to Blu-Ray or AVCHD.

Thanks

[edDV]

You need to either edit uncompressed (requies a 2 or 3 disk in RAID zero) or use a digital intermediate. Look at Cineform Prospect HD for full up Blu-Ray output. Cineform Neo Scene is a low cost alternative if this is an amatuer effort.


PS: You didn't mention your project format. Are you editing 4:2:2 YCbCr or 24bit RGB or higher bit depth?

Uncompressed editing requires:

1280x720p/59.94 8bit/component YCbCr requires 112MB/s to play 1x (plus audio) ... ~2 sata disk RAID

1280x720p/59.94 10bit/component YCbCr requires 148MB/s to play 1x (plus audio) ... ~3 sata disk RAID

1280x720p/59.94 24bit RGB (8bit/component) requires 165MB/s to play 1x (plus audio) ... ~4 sata disk RAID

1280x720p/59.94 32bit RGB (10bit/component) requires 220MB/s to play 1x (plus audio) ... ~5 sata disk RAID

Efficient editing requires more than 1x playback for cue (scrub timeline). For this you need 2-4x playback. So you would at least double the number of disks above for uncompressed timeline scrubbing.

[poisondeathray]

Image reading from stills is notoriously slow. If you encoded to a digital intermediate it will be significantly faster.

Also if you want to have transparency preserved in your project for farther editing this will limit your options as to what you can use. Not all formats will preserve the alpha channel (RGB+A or RGB32)

Whilst I can import the equivalent footage in AVI or MOV format without any problem the quality of the finished render suffers and just doesn't appear the same as a render from an image sequence.

That's not entirely true, because AVI and MOV are just containers. You must have used lossy compression. You can use a lossless AVI or MOV format. e.g. Huffyuv avi and UT avi have a RGB+A mode and so does quicktime mov with animation RGBA mode, both will preserve transparency and keep 100% quality - but then the problem is still scrubbing. (Note if you don't have transparency, just use RGB becuase it is significantly smaller than RGB+A)

What is your footage fps? 1280x720 30p ?

Another option might be to use a proxy for editing & switch out for Vegas. It's unfortunate that Premiere doesn't have this (because After Effects can use proxies)

http://www.hv20.com/showthread.php?t=23991

[edDV]

I just noticed Sparehead01 was from the UK so multiply all those uncompressed rates by 59.94/50=0.83

Premiere or Vegas can handle alpha and multi-channel compositing but the number of disks goes up for real time preview. When compositing, Cineform is much more practical but it won't be real time.

[Sparehead01]

Thanks guys for your help.

I was using footage 1280 x 720 @ 30fps which I rendered initialy into mov using the Animation Quiktime codec. It played fine on the pC but when I converted to DVD it was shockingly poor quality even though I had best settings selected.

Anyway I have discovered the reason for the slow performance. It was a combination of the metadata that CS4 writes when it opens footage and also me selecting the wrong settings. I'm back on track now and the software & PC are still coping!!! I will continue using image sequence cos they appear to be lossless and I can keep the footage this way until the final render to DVD, Blu-ray or AVCHD.