how many generations of lossy compression if editing dvd in nle

[codemaster]

I received some DVD's that I need to edit in a NLE. These DVD's were generated by a dvd camcorder, so the video clips are much more compressed than dv from dv camcorders.

Vegas Pro has native support for dvd camcorders. Vegas can import video from dvd camcorders, without transcoding to intermediate files.

How many lossy compressions there are, in each of the folowing two scenarios:

1. Import DVD into vegas -> export to uncompressed avi from Vegas, using debugmode plugin -> encode to h.264.

2. Decode DVD with DGIndex and compress with Lagarith to make avi intermediate files -> import the avi files into Vegas -> export to uncompressed avi from Vegas, using debugmode plugin -> encode to h.264.

In scenario 1, there are two lossy compressions, and in scenario 2 there is only one lossy compression ? If so, why and how ? Or in both scenarios, there is only one lossy compression ?

[poisondeathray]

Compression wise, both scenarios will be the same ; however lagarith is treated as "computer RGB" in vegas, not "studio RGB" - so you will lose superbrights. The better method out of those is #1, unless you corrected for Y' overshoots in YUV before converting to lagarith