convert my source media into a lossless codec before editing?

[lee09]

I've got several small videos from phones, kids cameras, and youtube downloads that I want to creatively piece together with Cyberlink Powerdirector 9.

They are in 3gp, .avi and .flv formats. From what I've read online, these aren't necessarily the best formats for editing, as they are highly compressed (so this makes more work for my system?).

So should I convert them (eg. using Avidemux or Super) into a lossless format (eg. huffyuv) before I import them into Powerdirector for all the editing I want to do?

I was planning on producing the final video in .mp4 video +.mp3 sound format, so that I get a small file size but at good quality, for distributing on facebook or youtube. They do actually import into PD9 just fine, and I did a bunch of editing and produced a nice little movie. Unfortunately on playback, there were times at the end when it paused & missed a bunch of frames. I thought that one of the reasons might be because of the source media formats.

I'm imagining that its 'more work / harder' for the PD9 to:

1. 'unpack' the compressed originals
2. do the editing changes
3. save into the final output vid

I'm assuming the above algorithm is how video editing works? If that's the case, then it would be less of a challenge for my old system if I could skip step 1, by feeding 'unpacked' media to PD9 (ie. video saved in a lossless format like huffyuv). In which case, PD9 would have an easier time, and produce a better vid in the end.

BUT i'm very new to video editing, maybe i'm overcomplicating things! I can't afford to upgrade my system, so that's not really an option, i'm looking for other ways around the problem. Thanks!

[jagabo]

Yes, using a lossless, all i frame, intermediate codec (like HuffYUV) will make it much easier on the editor. And you won't be losing any quality, assuming all the video is going to be reencoded anyway.

Note that there is such a thing as lossless editing -- where the video and audio aren't decompressed and recompressed, they're just copied from the input file to the output file. But it doesn't sound like you'll be doing that.