AVI Quality Compression

Avid's DnxHD is pretty good and free. I don't know if it's AVI or just MOV though. Why does it have to be AVI? The shop where I work runs all Windows machines, but we use MOV's all the time.

- The Great Szalam
(The 'Great' stands for 'Not So Great, in fact, Extremely Humble')

No trees were harmed in the creation of this message, but several thousand electrons were mildly inconvenienced.

Quicktime with the Photo JPEG codec at 90% is pretty visually close to lossless, but a much smaller file size than lossless.

- The Great Szalam
(The 'Great' stands for 'Not So Great, in fact, Extremely Humble')

No trees were harmed in the creation of this message, but several thousand electrons were mildly inconvenienced.

[Christopher Rotter] "I work with a video editor that is picky and requires only AVI or MOV input."

Actually, your video editor isn't picky enough. AVI and MOV are just containers. Your editor should be specifying a preferred codec as well.

Video containers are just like shipping containers: you can stuff just about anything into a shipping container, but because the box itself is standardized, the shipping industry can use the same set of tools to pick the box up with a crane and move it from a ship to train to a truck.

The stuff inside the shipping container -- that's your video, compressed with a specific codec. To work with the stuff within the container, an application must be compatible (and simpatico) with both the container format and the codec itself.

Walter Soyka
Principal & Designer at Keen Live
Motion Graphics, Widescreen Events, Presentation Design, and Consulting
RenderBreak Blog - What I'm thinking when my workstation's thinking
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[Christopher Rotter] "I understand this, what are you trying to tell me that no program exist as to what I'm after. :)"

Sorry to blather on about stuff you already knew.

Avid makes DNxHD freely available as a QuickTime codec only. There is no DirectShow or VfW implementation (one of which would be necessary for standard AVI output).

Walter Soyka
Principal & Designer at Keen Live
Motion Graphics, Widescreen Events, Presentation Design, and Consulting
RenderBreak Blog - What I'm thinking when my workstation's thinking
Creative Cow Forum Host: Live & Stage Events

[Christopher Rotter] "No DirectShow or VfW implementation. What is beneficial then using the Avid Codec and when you say it's a QuickTime Codec only, which means it only will play on QuickTime ? Sorry, want to make heads and tails of this :)"

It's not that it only "plays on QuickTime" -- it means that any application which uses the QuickTime libraries to access media files can read it. Practically speaking, that means that you could use a DNxHD QuickTime file in Avid, FCP, or Premiere Pro.

DNxHD is free and comparable in compression to ProRes, so you get great image quality at a fraction of the size of uncompressed.

If you must wrap in AVI, the CineForm codec is another outstanding option. The decoder is free, but you do have to pay for the encoder.

Walter Soyka
Principal & Designer at Keen Live
Motion Graphics, Widescreen Events, Presentation Design, and Consulting
RenderBreak Blog - What I'm thinking when my workstation's thinking
Creative Cow Forum Host: Live & Stage Events

Thank you for that explanation it helped :)