Sidebar Sidebar
Become a MacRumors Supporter for $50/year with no ads, ability to filter front page stories, and private forums.

Lossless editing

D

DisMyMac

macrumors 65816
Original poster
Sep 30, 2009
1,087
11
A few years ago I stopped encoding mp3s and now only make lossless audio rips of CDs. I think the time has come to edit video the same way... Any tips on how to approach this?

Encoding video is still necessary to save space, but "uncompressed" doesn't mean "lossless". (I tried exporting a movie to uncompressed PAL, and the resulting file was 340Gb!!! :eek:)

Am I right that exporting VOB/mpeg2 to DV is lossless? A typical DVD becomes maybe 20 to 40 Gb, which I then import to iMovie, edit, and then export using the same Quicktime settings I used to rip. The quality turns out good, but I'm not sure if my method is lossless or not.

Advice?
 
simsaladimbamba

simsaladimbamba

Guest
Nov 28, 2010
22,670
31
located
The method is not lossless, as MPEG-2 is already a very lossy format, as it only contains every 15th frame anyway.
But your way to transcode the video DVD footage to DV is okay, unless you are in a country with NTSC as broadcast system (USA or Japan), then it would be better to use Apple Intermediate Codec (AIC) as video codec.

 
D

DisMyMac

macrumors 65816
Original poster
Sep 30, 2009
1,087
11
simsaladimbamba said:
unless you are in a country with NTSC as broadcast system (USA or Japan),
Click to expand...

That's where the fun starts. I'm in the USA, but I like buying foreign DVDs and fixing them up - edit the subtitles, center and crop bad letterboxing, even correct the aspect ratio occasionally.

Maybe I should be using a PC, but in any case it's almost impossible to do these things losslessly.
 
simsaladimbamba

simsaladimbamba

Guest
Nov 28, 2010
22,670
31
located
DisMyMac said:
That's where the fun starts. I'm in the USA, but I like buying foreign DVDs and fixing them up - edit the subtitles, center and crop bad letterboxing, even correct the aspect ratio occasionally.

Maybe I should be using a PC, but in any case it's almost impossible to do these things losslessly.
Click to expand...

Every transcoding process involves losses, especially with such a lossy codec as MPEG-2.
Best to use just AIC as codec and be done with it I guess.
You can use MPEG Streamclip, as mentioned in the links, to transcode the ripped video DVDs properly.
 
You must log in or register to reply here.
Register on MacRumors! This sidebar will go away, and you'll see fewer ads.
Top Bottom