How to render DVD quality video without losing quality?

[TroyTheTech]

Hi TroyTheTech,
Sorry for the late response - I was searching for info on lossless codecs on the forum - My question is why wouldn't you use a lossless codec as suggested by John rather than WMV or Mpeg-4 for your 'pre-compression' video? Wouldn't using the lossless codec guarantee your pre-compression is...well...Lossless?

Hi Candive, no problem at all, I'm happy to reply anytime (if I can heh).

That's a good instinct you have (for keeping the Quality) and Lossless is always the way to go if you have the drive space; but the reason I used a high-bitrate lossy codec - originally, way back when I started doing this, is because the size for Lossless was a little too big to work with in the 90's (for a home user)... Lossless Video and Audio together is something in the realm of about 200MB/s for 1080p30 media, which is about 720GB for an hour of material - which was absolutely huge back when I started doing this (when my hard drive was 40GB at the time)... Even today, it is a bit too large for most home users (I myself don't ever have a spare 4TB of space just laying around unused - which is how much would be required to back up a 6-hour long EP-recorded VHS tape (if you wanted to keep the entire thing and utilize this process)). Good thinking, though.

If the price of drive space keeps going the way it is (and I don't want to go higher resolution than say, 1080p as a 'pre-compression' rez for that amount of archiving - just as an example of processing VHS/DVD material the way I do) - I just might do that one day... And if the average home user only wanted to keep a half hour or so of material from a home-movie DVD and had a 2TB drive in their system, relatively unused with lots of space still; they could totally do it today - which is great! I do agree that Lossless/Uncompressed is better (if it can be done..).

I merely keep stating my 'decades-old method' of using a lossy codec as an intermediary (albeit at a much higher bitrate than the original material) because not many people might have the large amount of space that dealing with Uncompressed might require ("video" editors likely do of course, but I am usually trying to keep things 'smaller' for the average home user). Soon though, noone will have to worry - everyone will be able to work with Uncompressed all the time... someday!

[Candive]

Hi Troy,
Thanks for clarifying your workflow which you have been using effectively for years. I agree, uncompressed lossless, is too large even today with the current drive capacities. But Mrjohnny in a previous post mentioned the following lossless compressed codecs which act like a zip file. They are compressed but no detail to thrown out to make the file size smaller like a lossy codec.

There are a number of lossless codes, usually in an AVI file format(wrapper). The ones I know of are: Lagarith, UT Video & HUFFYuv. You will need to find them on the Internet.

I decided to download and install Huffyuv and Lagarith. I believe Huffyuv was developed in the early 2000's and Lagarith, a fork of Huffyuv, was a later improvement. Once installed, you can then access them in VS by creating a custom AVI profile. I took a 29 second DV AVI clip and encoded it lossless, Huffyuv and Lagarith with the following results;

Original DV AVI clip; 108,988Kb
Lossless uncompressed; 898,624
Huffyuv; 205,296
Lagarith;144,055

As you can see, lossless uncompressed is over 8 times the size of the original! Huffyuv is only twice the size which is a big improvement over the uncompressed file, while Lagarith is marginally bigger than the original DV AVI clip. So I think people are now using these lossless compressed codecs as an intermediary file to edit before final output. I certainly will be now that I have discovered them.

[lata]

Hi
Video from a Mini DV camcorder is recorded as DV.AVI, this is a lossless format at 13Gb per hour
That is we can edit and render the original footage to DV.Avi original without loss in quality.
If we render the footage with no compression then the file will be approx. 64 Gb per hour. ( video Studio can do that)

Don’t get confused with lossless codecs and uncompressed.

If you wish to burn a standard DVD then the files used to do that have to be mpeg2 720 x 576 (480 ntsc)
Your 64 Gb / hour file will need downscaling to Mpeg2.

The 13Gb is high quality direct from the camera, one render to Mpeg2 burns the disc???