HDV footage taking forever to preview

[Brendan Coots]

Lots of excellent points made here, so not to dogpile but there is one other thing I would like to add.

The Animation codec vs. Uncompressed codec comparison is akin to JPEGs and GIFs with regards to how they behave, the Animation codec being like GIFs in this example. GIF files are great with solid blocks of color, aliased text and other solid chunks, and the files can be tiny. If you encode a photo in GIF format, you may be able to get it to look okay but the file will be huge because its compression is meant to deal with solids, not gradients. JPEGs on the other side are excellent with photos, but when they are fed solid blocks they tend to have artifacts within those solid expanses.

Part two of this is that you can create a 5,000×5,000 pixel, hour long Animation codec movie that, if it only contains a solid white box, will be a tiny file. That’s because it’s compression scheme can store solid areas very well. But encode a 100×100 pixel video in animation codec and the file will be quite large.

Where the Animation codec stores solid color chunks as one large entity to save file space, Uncompressed files treat every pixel in your image as unique and therefore even large white solids will result in huge files.

So all of that said, the Animation codec is NOT the best choice for video footage. It works well for 2d animations and graphics, but only because those tend to have more solid areas without gradient information. Because the files will be huge anyway if used with video, you would be MUCH better off rendering that video footage in 8-bit or 10-bit uncompressed, which ensures no information will be thrown away or mishandled by the codec. If you are doing any effects work or greenscreen extraction on the video, I would definitely stick to 10-bit uncompressed.