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What codec do you use for editing?

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Hi everybody. 

I'm about to start working on my edit again, but I want to do it as efficiently as possible.  After ripping a DVD to your hard drive and demuxing it, you have an MPEG-2 file.  Although you're not losing any quality by working this way (obviously), I have run into some kinks in Vegas.  Transitions don't always work.  There are sometimes glitches in cuts.  

It would be nice to be able to convert the MPEG 2 to a lossless, AVI like format made up of independent frames.  I understand Huffyuv is pretty popular. 

I was just wondering what some of the other editors use for this.  Thanks.

Episode II: Shroud of the Dark Side

Emperor Jar-Jar
“Back when we made Star Wars, we just couldn’t make Palpatine as evil as we intended. Now, thanks to the miracles of technology, it is finally possible. Finally, I’ve created the movies that I originally imagined.” -George Lucas on the 2007 Extra Extra Special HD-DVD Edition

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Huffyuv or Lagarith are both popular lossless codecs. Lagarith has the advantage that you can keep the video in YV12 colourspace, whereas Huffyuv only works with YUY2 or RGB.

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Really?  I knew lagarith was the best choice, but I didn't realize you could edit in Vegas in YV12!  If so, I might buy Vegas.  I thought Vega users converted to RGB. 

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Thanks for the help!

I'm running into new problems though...I am frameserving the MPEG from Sony Vegas into Virtual Dub.  I have tried encoding using both Lagarith and another lossless codec called MSU. 

For both, I import the new file into Vegas, and slowly, the video drifts out of synch with the original MPEG.  Does anyone know why this could be?  Does VirtualDub not work well with frameserving as input?  Thanks

Episode II: Shroud of the Dark Side

Emperor Jar-Jar
“Back when we made Star Wars, we just couldn’t make Palpatine as evil as we intended. Now, thanks to the miracles of technology, it is finally possible. Finally, I’ve created the movies that I originally imagined.” -George Lucas on the 2007 Extra Extra Special HD-DVD Edition

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May I ask why you are frameserving to VirtualDub?

By the way, I am now almost certain that Vegas does require RGB for editing, so Lagarith's advantage over HuffYUV would be one of file size.

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^^ I'm still not sure that Vegas can't do YUV.  Although the export options are all RGB, if you frameserve it out as AVI, you can select "YUV2".  

I was frameserving to VirtualDub because I was having real problems importing the MPEG 2 straight to Virtual Dub and running into interlace problems and pulldown problems...

Episode II: Shroud of the Dark Side

Emperor Jar-Jar
“Back when we made Star Wars, we just couldn’t make Palpatine as evil as we intended. Now, thanks to the miracles of technology, it is finally possible. Finally, I’ve created the movies that I originally imagined.” -George Lucas on the 2007 Extra Extra Special HD-DVD Edition

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I think that's a conversion back to YUV, but there you go.  :-)

You should really remove pulldown before editing.  I take it your source is NTSC. 

Why are you going to Virtualdub, not why are you frameserving there? 

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I went to VirtualDub in order to encode to Lagarith, HSU, etc.  Is there another way?  

The reason I was frameserving out of Vegas was because Vegas automatically removes the pulldown and converts to 24 frames a second....

Episode II: Shroud of the Dark Side

Emperor Jar-Jar
“Back when we made Star Wars, we just couldn’t make Palpatine as evil as we intended. Now, thanks to the miracles of technology, it is finally possible. Finally, I’ve created the movies that I originally imagined.” -George Lucas on the 2007 Extra Extra Special HD-DVD Edition

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Let me get this straight.  You want to make an AVI for editing, but are running your original MPEG through Vegas just to remove the pulldown.  There are far better ways to do that and make your AVI.

Is your source an NTSC DVD?

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Yes, it is NTSC.

Episode II: Shroud of the Dark Side

Emperor Jar-Jar
“Back when we made Star Wars, we just couldn’t make Palpatine as evil as we intended. Now, thanks to the miracles of technology, it is finally possible. Finally, I’ve created the movies that I originally imagined.” -George Lucas on the 2007 Extra Extra Special HD-DVD Edition

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Do this.  You will need to have dgindex and Avisynth installed.

1.  Rip your DVD with DVD FAB 7 (free version)

2.  Pull out your required video and audio streams with Pgcdemux.

3. Load your MPEG-2 file into dgindex. 

Video --> field operation --->  Forced Film

Save as whatever.d2v

4.  Copy this script into notepad and save as whatever.avs

Loadplugin("Your_Directory\DGDecode.dll")
Mpeg2Source("Your_Directory\whatever.d2v")

The first line might be unnecessary.

5.  Open whatever.avs in Virtualdubmod.

Video --> Compression -->  Lagarith --> Configure --> YV12

This is if you want to stay in YV12.  You will probably want to change to RGB if Vegas cannot handle YV12 AVI and convert it internally.  As I said, I don't think it can.

(I check prevent upsampling when decoding if am creating YV12, but I don't think it is necessary.  You don't check it if you are creating RGB.)

Save as AVI and make sure fast recompress is checked if you kept the file in YV12.  Saving as normal recompress or full processing mode will trigger a conversion to RGB. 

There are other ways of doing this, but I find dgindex is the most reliable way to remove pulldown flags. 

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VirtualDubMod gave me 3 error messages, so I used "VirtualDub MPEG2".  I did a test with HuffYUV and Lagrarith, and both are in synch.  

Thank you!

Episode II: Shroud of the Dark Side

Emperor Jar-Jar
“Back when we made Star Wars, we just couldn’t make Palpatine as evil as we intended. Now, thanks to the miracles of technology, it is finally possible. Finally, I’ve created the movies that I originally imagined.” -George Lucas on the 2007 Extra Extra Special HD-DVD Edition

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You're welcome.  :-)  Did you successfully import the AVI into Vegas?   I'm 99% sure it can't import YV12 Lagarith AVI.

What were the error messages for VirtualDubMod?  It really is better to use than VirtualDub MPEG-2, which I used to use.

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VirtualDubMod is very old.

VirtualDub-MPEG2 is also now obsolete, the most up-to-date option is to use VirtualDub with the MPEG-2 plugin. (The MPEG-2 plugin is of course not required if you're using DGMPGDec/AviSynth).

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Moth3r, I agree with you that Virtualdub is more up-to-date; however, I still recommend VirtualDubMod to people.  The reason is that VirtualDub does not handle interlaced YV12 properly, whereas VirtualDubMod does.  If interlaced YV12 is imported into Virtualdub, the video will suffer from the chroma upsampling error.  This is not a problem with the method I outlined above, as the source has been made progressive by the time it enters the program, but I feel it is usually better to recommend VirtualDubMod to people who are new to this sort of thing, as it always avoids this problem. 

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Moth3r said:

Huffyuv or Lagarith are both popular lossless codecs. Lagarith has the advantage that you can keep the video in YV12 colourspace, whereas Huffyuv only works with YUY2 or RGB.

So in your opinion Lagarith is the better of the 2, damn I am still using Huffy, time for a change.