which format?

#1

I’m about to embark on my first big 3d/compositing project, my question is what image format works best & most efficiently with combustion ie avi, quicktime, tgas? my gut feeling is to use tgas but I’m just curious.

I’ve already captured via premiere 6.5 and a sony PD150 but I know need to know what format will be most efficient in C2 as directshow dv footage doesn’t work.

any help would be greatly appeciated

Derek

#2

Hi,
If your source footages for compositing are Mini DV format, better way to export them to Combustion is export them in avi or quicktime movie with Pal (or NTSC) DV codec. That way you will not loose any signal generation. When you finish your job in C2 process them with same codec (avi or quicktime movie with Pal (or NTSC) DV codec). Because Mini DV format is compressed 1/5 from MiniDV camcorders (thats how to works Mini DV things) but when you capture this footages with Premiere, it will not compressed second time. So if you use another format (tga for exemple) to export them from Premiere, it will not make a big difference in C2. But in C2 if you will process them with another format, sure you will have problems when you will import the finished job in Premiere because Premiere will compressed the sequence 2nd time for translating to DV format.
I hope this helps…

#3

Thanks for your quick response, that would make sense. Do you also know of any speed issues with the different formats ie does it take longer to decompress dv footage than it would to display a series of tga’s

Thanks again for your response

derek

#4

I’m sorry Milo, but I have to disagree on a small point.

I agree that he should capture his source footage as DV codec AVI or quicktime, but he’s going to have to take a generation loss if he processes it with combustion at all. Combustion has to uncompress the DV footage to do whatever it’s going to do with it, and then the result will have to get recompressed (either by combustion or by premiere) to DV to go back out to tape.

I must admit though that I don’t really do much DV work (most of my video comes in via DIVO or XTHD ;)), so take my words with a grain of salt!

#5

Thanks Phred42, I’m actually not that bothered with quality as my footage has been shot pretty well & I know it’s not going to degrade that much in the recompressing process. I guess the the root of the question really is what format performs best in C2.
eg. does a footage file such as an avi or mov load up & play much faster than a series of tgas.

I’ve got a raid 0 set up on an athlon 1900xp with 2 gig of ram & it seems to take quite a while to actually read the tgas into RAM.

Is there perhaps a more realtime solution I should look for?

Thanks again for the reply

derek

#6

Well I can tell you that the mac version of C2 can’t handle quicktime files over 2 gigs in size. Unless they fixed the problem in 2.1. I don’t know. Mine seems to crash when I import large quicktime files.

Regards
Alan Bell

#7

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