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DV / DVAVI Question
Hi all.
I have a question. What is the difference between a DV AVI and an AVI ? and which uses up more memory ? nad which has the best image quality ?
When working in Premiere, I usually render the finished project out as a DV AVI, and then import that file back into the timeline, in order to render it as an mpeg2 (for DVD).
Should I be rendering avi’s and not DV avi’s ? What about quicktime .mov ?
So confusing.
Thanks for you time.
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1 Reply
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https://www.petesvideo.com/vidDVformats.htm
They’re all digital videos, videos that are made up of bits & bytes. Numbers. Ones and zeroes. They can be viewed on computers that have the necessary software to translate those numbers into something we can see and hear.
AVI stands for audio-video-interleaved format. It originated on Windows, and feels more comfortable there, so is used by a lot of Windows-only software and hardware. Within the AVI format, there are a number of “flavours”, each represented by a compression scheme or codec, that allows us to fit (and play back) digital videos on our computers. DV is one such scheme, as is Cinepak and Uncompressed. All are AVI’s, but Cinepak makes small ugly movies, Uncompressed makes pretty (but huge and generally unplayable), and DV lies in between, making movies that are playable but not as pretty as uncompressed.
In case you were wondering, Uncompressed movies are not played, but are sent to another app (for later compression) uncompressed to retain quality. You don’t want to compress compressed movies. For example, you’d make an uncompressed movie in AE then send it to another app for MPEG-2 (DVD) compression to retain quality.
There are many flavours of Quicktime, depending on the codec. Quicktime has many more codecs available compared to AVI. Quicktime also has a DV codec.
DV Quicktimes are the same size as DV AVIs. Uncompressed Quicktimes are (AFAIK) the same size as uncompressed AVIs. There are some “uncompressed” codecs, which actually compress without quality loss, such as Blackmagic for Quicktime and Matrox Digisuite for AVI, if I recall.
Generally, Mac users can only use Quicktime, but Windows users can use both. I use Quicktime on both. Sometimes Windows users are forced to use AVI.
Regarding your question, start from the end: what does your MPEG-2 compressor want? If it wants AVI, you should only give it DV if you have not altered the original DV clip in something like AE. Otherwise, you should give it an uncompressed AVI rendered out of AE to maintain quality. DV is compressed: avoid recompression if possible.
I don’t think Premiere uses quicktime any more, yes? Neither does Encore.
… and you mean “disk space”, not “memory”. 🙂
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