I am wondering about using MPEG-1 or 2 compressed video as a storage medium on CD-R. My main purpose would be to store the compressed video in order to make room on my hard-drive, and then look to uncompress it back to .avi at a later stage for editing etc. Is this a viable option or would there be significant quality loss going from .avi to mpeg and back to .avi. Any help much appreciated!

-- Derek (dereksider@home.com), June 20, 2001

Answers

There will be a lot of quality loss. It's better to keep AVI on original tape for future capture and editing.

-- ktnwin (ktnwin@excite.com), June 20, 2001.

MPEG-1/2 are lossy mediums and are most suited for distribution or other situations where no editing is planned for the future. It's like graphic artists never storing on-going work in *.JPG, rather in *.BMP, etc., and the last edited version is the one stored in *.JPG. Best you encode it back to type-1 DV, then just record it back to DV or D8 tape. Absolutely no loss in quality since it's digital, so you can always come back to it later and re-transfer to your HDD for editing. If you fear your tapes could be damaged for whatever reason you can always make copies of them ad infinitum without signal loss.

-- Mehmet Tekdemir (turk690@yahoo.com), June 21, 2001.

you should use the mpeg2 i frame codec avi in order to save the data on cd`s then you can easily edit them on premere and export back to mpeg1(vcd) or mpeg2 (svcd\dvd)

you won`t lose quality if you use a high bitrate i frame

-- judicator aldaris (elad@assifgur.co.il), June 21, 2001.