jtara - 7:19 pm on Sep 22, 2007 (gmt 0)

Okay, from the source, what would be the best option for me to choose? Should I be considering .flv

The source - what format was it originally recorded in?

Do you possess the source?

If it was recorded on VHS tape, the source is VHS tape, for example.

If it is a computer animation, the source might be a series of still TIFF images.

The highest-quality source accessible to most of us is probably DV. There are now plenty of reasonably-priced DV cameras available to consumers. Yes, DV is a lossy format, but (1) one that was designed to be edited and (2) it's the best format available from the camera. Can't get better than that in any case. If you have DV content, don't muck it up by converting, say, to MPEG before editing! Edit in DV, or some other format that can be converted losslessly from DV, then convert after editing.

Always start with the source, and convert from there. Don't convert a conversion, unless it is in a lossless format. It's OK to convert to some intermediate format first, as long as converting to that format is lossless, or minimally lossy. You might do some post-processing in the process - for example, to clean-up noise on the aforementioned VHS tape. It would make sense then to work with the processed version for editing.

But you're never going to get more information out of the content than was originally recorded. Once you convert to a lossy format (or, at least one that isn't capable of exactly reproducing the original) you are going to lose detail.

There are some specific cases where one lossy format can be converted to another with no loss, or some transforms can be done in a lossy format with no loss. But, these are generally far and few between.

(Example: with the right software a still JPEG image can be rotated 90 degrees with no loss. JPEG was designed to make this possible. Most image-rotating software, though, decompresses the image, rotates it, and re-compresses it - with loss.)

Any time you edit a lossy format, the editor is actually doing the latter. It decompresses images from the input format (in most cases today, having to create frames that aren't even there, since lossy video compression algorithms depend on intra-frame compression) you do your editing, and then it re-compresses. So, you have loss even if you stay in the same format.

(There are exceptions - if you are just doing simple cut-point editing, the editor may leave the parts before and after the cut intact. You will have a few frames with degraded quality around the cut.)

Especially if you are doing any compositing, effects, fade, adding text, etc. the editor will have to decompress and re-compress.

There's way too much willy-nilly converting from one lossy format to another going on. There's a reason YouTube videos are only 320x240, and aren't going to get bigger any time soon if ever. For the service to be practical, they have to be able to convert from whatever format users throw at them. But it's hardly quality video.

If you don't care about image quality, I guess none of this applies, though. There's plenty of software out there that will give you enough rope to hang yourself.