Depends on my source footage. If I shoot it myself it will usually either be DV NTSC or HDV 1080 30fps via a Canon XH-A1. However if I get it from another production house, which is the case half the time then I’m not sure exactly what the source started as, but it always comes to me as uncompressed AVI’s, often times 720×486.
In the end my video often ends up being 320×240 at 150kbps-400kbps FLV compression. So it’s very low. That’s one of the reasons I think a little 2:1 compression or so on my intermediate files wouldn’t be too bad.
Having the source and the intermediate files both be uncompressed is using a lot of file space quickly.