Being, at the moment, ‘between systems’ but heading when finances permit, towards HD, I have looked at many systems. My footage is in a ‘native’ DV-AVI, (ex DV-tape) and it has paid me to keep it in that format for as long as possible, so all footage, once ‘logged-in’ is saved in both DV-AVI and high quality mpg2; since for the duration of the present ‘product’, I intend to stick with that format, (which is the one dictated by the ‘DVD-standard’ in any case’).Following that, I am open to suggestions. I have experimented with various h264/mpg4 formats, but have not yet found one to equal the simplicity of mpg2; in fact, the opposite, a common problem being pixellation clusters of either 16px square or in the worst cases 64px square, especially in the first 500 milliseconds or so, of shots. If such pixellation is common, ‘Worthjoh’, I’d be taking a look at the various settings available in whatever process you are using. Frequently going for higher quality, (albeit, at the cost of longer transcoding times), proves to be the answer.
The advantage, in my case, of logging and saving footage in DV-AVI, is that it preserves an uncompressed image intact for future use, possibly radically improved codecs becoming available in the future, for example. Also, and it’s a consideration, there are many software facilities, such as ‘Avisynth’, ‘Virtualdub’, which work only on AVI footage, as far as I know.
