VideoHelp Forum
+ Reply to Thread
Results 1 to 7 of 7
Thread
  1. Member
    Join Date
    May 2016
    Location
    Lithopolis, OH United States
    Search Comp PM
    I will admit that i might be more nuanced than I am making it but is one format better than the other? What differences between the Lossy and Lossless formats? And What are pros and cons of both formats?
    Quote Quote  
  2. Member Cornucopia's Avatar
    Join Date
    Oct 2001
    Location
    Deep in the Heart of Texas
    Search PM
    Better at what?

    Remember, these are general CLASSES of formats, not the formats themselves. If you do a comparison, the actual codecs should be taken into consideration.

    But in general, lossless has better quality than lossy, because it hasn't lost anything.
    Lossy is more efficient with bitrate, which can be very important on most systems where bandwidth, or storàge are constrained.
    Lossless is less taxing on the CPU, because less gymnastics are being done to shrink the size.
    Lossy is more common.

    As you can see, one cannot make an educated decision of what to use without taking these scenarios and one's priorization of them into account.


    Scott
    Quote Quote  
  3. Member
    Join Date
    May 2016
    Location
    Lithopolis, OH United States
    Search Comp PM
    I stand advised then.
    Quote Quote  
  4. Kawaiiii
    Join Date
    May 2021
    Location
    Italy
    Search Comp PM
    Lossless means better quality, obviously, but - for video - also HUGE.. very HUGE - file sizes.

    That's why, even for professional video editing, mid-format codecs (lossy, but with very low compression) are used, such as ProRES and DNx.
    Quote Quote  
  5. Member
    Join Date
    May 2016
    Location
    Lithopolis, OH United States
    Search Comp PM
    What Lossy and Lossless codecs are good video encoding and editing?
    Quote Quote  
  6. Member
    Join Date
    May 2005
    Location
    Australia-PAL Land
    Search Comp PM
    For editing, Lossless is less taxing on your system eg HUFFYUV and LAGARITH. However, as pointed out by krykmoon, file sizes are pretty big. Lagarith 720x576 is around 30gb per hour.

    But, it depends upon where you are getting your video from. If you're capturing VHS, you could use Huff and Lagarith. But if your video is coming from a phone or video camera, I would say it is best to not convert it for editing unless your system can't cope, then you have to come up with another approach.

    For export/encoding, MP4 of some type eg h264, h265 is suitable.
    Last edited by Alwyn; 11th May 2021 at 03:21. Reason: Spelling.
    Quote Quote  
  7. Kawaiiii
    Join Date
    May 2021
    Location
    Italy
    Search Comp PM
    Originally Posted by Guernsey View Post
    What Lossy and Lossless codecs are good video encoding and editing?
    For editing: as Alwyn said.. if the source is already compressed and your computer can handle it.. it is advisable to keep it as it is, unless the video editor struggles to move between frames and you have to do a very refined editing.. so converting it to PRORes or DNx is the best choice, in this case.

    These lossless mid-codecs are very high quality (they're used in the industry too for professional editing): they give you smaller files than the ones you would have using lossy codecs (but bigger than the original ones) that are very easy for the video editing software to deal with..

    You can move a lot more smoothly between frames back and forth.. a thing that is impossible when the file use a final codec such as h264/h265 (especially going BACK, due to the nature of the algorithms used to compress the video)

    For the final export: AVC(h264) and HEVC(h265) are, de facto, the universal standard nowadays (they're used even in bluray disks).
    Quote Quote  



Similar Threads

Visit our sponsor! Try DVDFab and backup Blu-rays!